Stones In the Field

A Gallimaufry, to Start Myself Posting Here Again

2010-06-22T10:55:00.000-07:00

Over on Marguerite Says, we're talking about games we played as kids in the comments thread, here. It's awfully funny, and a miracle most of us lived to grow up. You should come play too. Especially if you invented hair-raising and death defying games with your siblings.

Completely unrelated, except via the tenuous link of nostalgia, you know how sometimes an ad just...misses? This old bicycle ad elicits a baffled wtf, from me. Anyone else? Buehler?

I have NO idea what's going on there. Was she trying to make the bear-lion thing ride the bicycle? Is she going to escape the bear-lion thing, on the handy Monarch bicycle? This is not a narrative I'm understanding.

Finally, I'm also blogging cooking, living and eating well, and creating home on a budget, all with my Mom and with Lisa, who you can also find at Something Pacific Northwest. You'll find all of us at http://thecreatinghome.com or http://creating-home.blogspot.com/

Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition

2010-02-20T18:31:00.000-08:00

Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition

www.shortstorycompetition.com

$2000 Awaits Winners of Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition

Writers of short fiction are encouraged to enter the 2010 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. The competition has a twenty-nine-year history of literary excellence, and its organizers are dedicated to enthusiastically supporting the efforts and talent of emerging writers of short fiction whose voices have yet to be heard.

Lorian Hemingway, granddaughter of Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway, is the author of three critically acclaimed books:
Walking into the River, Walk on Water, and A World Turned Over.
Ms. Hemingway is the competition's final judge.

Prizes and Publication:

The first-place winner will receive $1,000. The second and third-place winners will receive $500 each. Honorable mentions will also be awarded to entrants whose work demonstrates promise.

The Saturday Evening Post To Publish First-Place Winner:

The Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition is pleased to announce that each year -- beginning with our 2009 competition -- The Saturday Evening Post will publish our first-place winner in its pages. And occasionally, the Post may also choose to publish our runners-up, either in its pages or on its website.

The Post will pay a fee to winners upon publication of his or her story, in addition to the $1,000 first-place prize given by the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. The Post's payment will be in keeping with the magazine's general rate structure for fiction at the time of publication. Entrants whose stories are published will allow The Post first serial rights, nonexclusive electronic (including online) rights, and nonexclusive anthology rights. This is a standard agreement for magazine publication.

For many years it has been our dream to be able to offer an assured publication for our first-place winner. The Saturday Evening Post, through its generosity and deep appreciation for new voices in literary fiction, has made that dream come true.

Breaking News:

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST PARTNERS WITH INTERNATIONALLY RESPECTED LORIAN HEMINGWAY SHORT STORY COMPETITION, BECOMES EXCLUSIVE PUBLISHER OF WINNING STORY

"Lazarus" by 2009 Winner Gregory Loselle is Published in Jan/Feb 2010 Issue

Lorian Hemingway Joins The Post's Prestigious Fiction Advisory Board Along with New Members Robert Stone, Gary Svee and Ray Bradbury

Indianapolis, IN, February 4, 2010 - The Saturday Evening Post, the nation's oldest magazine, which traces its roots to Benjamin Franklin and is famous for covers that illustrate the lives and experiences of the American people, today announced its exclusive partnership with the internationally respected Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, publishing 2009's winning story in its Jan/Feb 2010 issue. Joan SerVaas, chief executive officer and publisher of The Saturday Evening Post, made the announcement.

The Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition (www.shortstorycompetition.com), in its 30th year, supports and encourages the efforts of emerging writers of short fiction. As part of the partnership, The Post will have the first serial rights to and annually be the exclusive magazine publisher of the competition's winning story. "Lazarus," by 2009 winner Gregory Loselle, can be read in the magazine's current issue.

Throughout its history, The Saturday Evening Post has introduced and published fiction and poetry from a long list of celebrated writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Jack London, Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The magazine's new alliance with the competition is part of The Post's recent restoration of fiction as an important component of its editorial mix.

"While it's important to tap into our vast archives of fiction, it is equally important for The Post to maintain its role as the leader in finding the next great American fiction writers, and forming this partnership is a significant step toward meeting that goal," said SerVaas."

Lorian Hemingway, author of the critically-acclaimed books Walk On Water, A World Turned Over and Walking Into The River, said, "For many years it has been our dream to be able to offer an assured publication for our first-place winner. The Saturday Evening Post, through its deep appreciation for new voices in literary fiction, has made that dream come true."

In addition to the alliance, Lorian Hemingway has joined The Post's prestigious Fiction Advisory Board, along with new members Robert Stone, Gary Svee and Ray Bradbury. The board advises the magazine's editors on fiction selections and recommends up-and-coming fiction writers.

Eligibility requirements for our 2010 competition are as follows:

What to submit:

Stories must be original unpublished fiction, typed and double-spaced, and may not exceed 3,000 words in length. There are no theme restrictions. Copyright remains property of the author, with the exception of the first-place winner, whose work will be published in The Saturday Evening Post.

Who may submit:

The literary competition is open to all U.S. and international writers whose fiction has not appeared in a nationally distributed publication with a circulation of 5,000 or more. Writers who have been published online or who have self-published will be considered on an individual basis.

Submission requirements:

Submissions may be sent via regular mail or submitted online at: shortstorykw@gmail.com. Please visit our online submissions page for complete instructions regarding online submissions. Writers may submit multiple entries, but each must be accompanied by an entry fee and separate cover sheet. We do accept simultaneous submissions; however, the writer must notify us if a story is accepted for publication or wins an award prior to our July announcements. No entry confirmation will be given unless requested. No SASE is required.
The author's name should not appear on the story. Our entrants are judged anonymously. Each story must be accompanied by a separate cover sheet with the writer's name, complete mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, the title of the piece, and the word count. Manuscripts will not be returned. These requirements apply for online submissions as well.

Deadlines and Entry Fees:

The entry fee is $12 for each story postmarked by April 1, 2010. The late entry fee is $17 for each story postmarked between April 2 and May 15. We encourage you to enter by April 1 if at all possible, but please know that your story will still be accepted if you meet the later deadline. Our dual deadline must be imposed this year due to information already in print in Writer's Market, etc. that states May 15 as our final deadline. We apologize for this inconvenience. Beginning with our 2011 competition we will have a single deadline. Entries postmarked after May 15, 2010 will not be accepted. Entries submitted online after May 15 will not be accepted. Writers may submit for the 2011 competition beginning May 16, 2010.

How to pay your entry fee:

Entry fees submitted by mail with their accompanying stories may be paid -- in U.S. funds -- via a personal check, cashier's check, or money order. Please make checks payable to LHSSC or The Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. Entry fees for online submissions may be paid with PayPal.

Announcement of Winners and Honorable Mentions:

Winners will be announced at the end of July 2010 in Key West, Florida, and posted on our website soon afterward. Only the first-place entrant will be notified personally. All entrants will receive a letter from Lorian Hemingway and a list of winners, either via regular mail or e-mail, by October 1, 2010.

All manuscripts and their accompanying entry fees should be sent to:

The Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition

P.O. Box 993

Key West, FL 33041

or submitted online at: shortstorykw@gmail.com

For more information, please explore this website or e-mail: shortstorykw@gmail.com

Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition Online Submissions
We are pleased to announce that we are now able to accept online submissions to our competition, in addition to continuing to accept entries by mail. We have been accustomed to doing things the old-fashioned way for so long -- 2010 will mark the 30th anniversary of the competition -- that accepting stories online seems like a bold step into a brave new world, and while we have a bit of stage fright we do believe that this additional option of submitting your stories will help save a few trees in the long run.
Below please find what we trust are rather simple guidelines for online submissions:

Online Submission Guidelines:

All submissions must meet the requirements set forth in our regular guidelines. Stories must be original, unpublished fiction. Word count: 3,000 words or less.
A Paypal account is required for online submissions. If you would like to sign up for Paypal, please click this link to be taken to their signup page: Paypal Signup. If you do not wish to have a Paypal account, please follow the normal submission procedures described on the Guidelines page.
Use the PayPal drop-down selection to pay for your submission prior to sending your story. You will be given a choice of paying for the April 1 deadline entry fee or for the April 2 - May 15 late deadline entry fee. Please make sure you choose the appropriate one.
In the subject line of your submission please write the Transaction ID number given to you by PayPal, along with your full name as it appears on your PayPal receipt.
Please print out a copy of your PayPal receipt for your records.
Once your transaction is completed you may submit your story to shortstorykw@gmail.com after following the very important guidelines provided below:
Stories must be submitted in Microsoft Word Document format, as an attachment. Please do not send your story in the body of an email.
Each story must be accompanied first by a cover sheet that includes the writer's name, the title of the story, his or her complete mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, and the word count of the work submitted. The author's name should not appear on the story. Only the title should appear on the manuscript.
Writers may submit multiple entries, but these must be submitted as separate Microsoft Word documents, with separate cover sheets and separate entry fees.
If you have questions regarding online submissions please do not hesitate to contact us at: shortstorykw@gmail.com

Many thanks and the very best of luck to all who enter!

Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition Submissions

Through April 1st, 2010 $12.00

April 2 through May 15, 2010 $17.00

A Christmas Story

2009-12-24T16:39:00.001-08:00

Writer Joe Ekaitis sent me this. I thought it was very much worth sharing.

Joyeux Noel, everyone. Every year that passes, I continue to feel blessed by your presence.

The longest night

2009-12-21T10:57:00.000-08:00

Solstice morning in Newgrange, 2007:

Newgrange solstice 2007
by erickfp

Happy Solstice to you. May the turning of the year find you warm, loved, with plenty.

A Very Merry Thanksgiving, All

2009-11-26T13:04:00.000-08:00

I so want to deep-fry a turkey, one of these days.

Just not in this tiny little third-floor apartment...

End of Summer 2009

2009-09-20T15:50:00.001-07:00

Fall in the Pacific Northwest really is incredible. Today was one of those crystalline-perfect autumn days, when the air is just cool enough for a jacket, but the sun is bright and slanting golden, and the sky a brilliant watercolor wash of blue. Definitely a fine day for a walk, since anyone who has lived here long enough to see the seasons change a few times knows that the weather can't last, and soon enough the rains will come sweeping in, then stay for months.

A walk down to the fish hatchery, then up Whatcom Creek, past the back of the library, stopping to buy a bottle of cheap wine and a quarter's worth of fine sea salt at the public market, made for a very pleasant stroll of about three and a half miles. Admittedly, it always makes me miss having a dog, watching other people in the park playing frisbee with their pups.

I'm utterly smitten and enchanted by the salmon working their way up the fish-ladder at the fish hatchery. And even more enchanted by the fish working their way up through the water spilling down the rocks of Whatcom Creek. And, for a wonder, I remembered my camera today, too.

All I can think about, watching them, is all the different stories about magical fish. There are stories about salmon, specifically, from lots of different cultures and folk traditions, too. Local First Nations traditions include many anecdotes and intersections between salmon, people, coyote, and the waters that run out to the sea:

A disagreement between Tyee Salmon and Steelhead resulted in only Tyee Salmon going up the north fork of the Puyallup River and red salmon only going up the south fork. Salmon run all the way up into the Cascades because Coyote broke the weir constructed by the Sandpiper women and cleared the way for salmon to go upstream. Because of that, the Naches people could also fish for part of their food.

And in Celtic traditions, salmon figure into stories of heroes, bards, and kings. Fionn Mac Cumhail caught and cooked the legendary Salmon of Knowledge at Rossnaree, according to legend.

And in about ten days I leave for the east coast, for Viable Paradise. It's odd to think that the rains could come while I'm gone, and this all might look very different when I come home again.

Requiescat In Pace

2009-09-16T22:11:00.000-07:00

Mary Travers has died.

My mom had all their records, stuck in the very back of the big console record player, with her previous name written with indelible marker, using careful and pretty cursive, on the album covers.

I asked about those albums, once. The resulting conversation was one of those odd and slightly disconcerting experiences that result when children discover that a parent was complete human being, with stories of her own, before having children.

Health Care

2009-09-12T13:44:00.000-07:00

There was a Bellingham rally for the single-payer option, today, and as the chanting throng of people wended their way under my window, I could hear the occasional heckler shout from a passing car.

The cat sat in the window and growled at the commotion.

And I haven't been able to stop thinking about the discussion on Jay Lake's LJ post where he posted a short list of questions, polling his readers about their positions on illegal immigrants and American health care.

I gave my own answers on LiveJournal instead on in Jay's comment thread, because there's plenty of sound and fury there, already -- and if ever we needed a meme, folks, a meme about things that really matter is worth the time to at least think about deeply, even if you don't want to say anything out loud for whatever reason. These are questions everyone in this country needs to look at head-on, though.

And there comes a time that you have to decide what's right and what's wrong, and oddly enough? I've never actually found, in 42 years of living so far, that there's any meaningful and intrinsic relationship between a price tag and doing the right thing.

Finally, that oft-repeated right-wing meme about illegal immigrants sucking off of everyone else? How come the people repeating that never mention the estimated 7 BILLION dollars paid into Social Security by undocumented workers? Or the estimated 1.5 BILLION dollars paid in Medicare taxes?

Monday, Monday...

2009-04-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

If you Google-search "Amazon rank" this morning, the top three hits don't actually take you anywhere near amazon.com. Those top hits either take you to this page, instead, or to commentary about why the Google-bombing happened. And I'll confess, I was deeply, seriously tempted to link the words "Amazon rank" above to the smartbitchestrashybooks.com page, too, because I think it's funnier than heck, and I'm spitting mad about Amazon.com pretty clearly not caring enough about this Easter-weekend "glitch" (that apparently has been going on since late last year, in actuality) to issue any sort of substantive statement beyond what amounts to, "Gosh, there seems to have been some sort of glitch."

More Amazonfail links:
LA Times book blog
Wall Street Journal blog on Amazonfail story
Dear Author, on metadata, has the best theory so far

I dunno. Maybe I'm just not in a demographic that Amazon cares about. Right now, though, I'm looking at the Amazon ad in AW's sidebar, and thinking a button that goes to Powell's would look pretty good there, instead. Making Light has a cogent and rational discussion about the #amazonfail debacle, with a smarter-than-average bunch of tech-savvy commenters participating.

And speaking of Twitter, we're playing a query-writing game on the AW forums, inspired by Agent Colleen Lindsay's blog contest back in January, and by this exercise (via agent Janet Reid, on—you guessed it—Twitter!) It's a fairly difficult exercise, which makes it a lot of fun. If you don't want to post in public, think about playing along at home to sharpen your own query hooks.

Okay, big changes a-coming

2009-04-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

I've managed to fix the archives. That's the good news.

The bad news is, I had to nuke and pave the customized template.

However, that's okay -- it gives me a fun reason to start all over, and my sidebar links were pretty out of date, anyway.

So, umm -- Hi, folks. Welcome back. In the meantime, you can find me blogging at Northwest Specialties, at The Horse Forum, and Blues Talk. I'm having rather a lot of fun doing it, too, so I hope to see you there.

A summer of diversity in E-fiction

2009-01-18T15:09:00.000-08:00

My own response to the Great Debate 2009 regarding post-colonialism, cultural appropriation, sexism, racism, etc. in Science Fiction and Fantasy is this:

Let's stop wanking, and do something constructive.

I run a small ezine, and a large website/newsletter for writers, as well as a pretty big message board. I will commit my energy and resources to spotlighting fiction about and from the "Other" all summer.

Join me?

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2008-10-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

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2008-10-09T14:00:00.000-07:00

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2008-10-09T12:14:00.000-07:00

Turning North.

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2008-10-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

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2008-10-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

I love the interwebs.

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2008-10-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

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2008-10-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

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2008-10-09T11:13:00.000-07:00

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2008-10-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

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2008-10-09T11:07:00.000-07:00

Tiresome Administrative Tasks

2008-07-07T01:48:00.001-07:00

Technorati Profile

2008 Kalamazoo Paper

2008-05-10T19:22:00.000-07:00

Posting the text of the paper presented this afternoon, at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies (because I said I would.) The happy part is that I can actually hyperlink the stuff that ought to be hyperlinked -- which , of course, is how God Meant for Text to Be.

Text in Motion: Navel-Gazing as Pedagogical Strategy

John Gower wrote:

That men mowe take remembrance
Of that thei schall hierafter rede:
For in good feith this wolde I rede,
That every man ensample take
Of wisdom which him is betake,
And that he wot of good aprise
To teche it forth, for such emprise
Is forto preise; and therfore I
Woll wryte . . . (John Gower, Confessio Amantis 1.76-84)

Okay, maybe he wasn't talking specifically about blogging -- but he knew that written text lasts in a way the spoken word simply cannot. Blogging continues an unbroken tradition of writing that is simultaneously personal and pedagogical, both private and public: it's a hybrid of journaling, conversation, and writing-as-performance.

This isn't a new idea, of course -- but implies that the nature of text itself is perhaps less static than we might like to think, but at the same time rather more stable than we might fear; even while digital text changes the very nature of how we perceive and use the written word.

The word itself, text, is from the PIE base *tek- "make" -- cognate with technology. The etymology implies a process, weaving, possessing texture and dimension -- which is an excellent description of electronic text: text as action, in addition to text as object.

I've been hearing people express concern about the future of text almost since I began to read. I remember a Philosophy professor laughing at himself but also expressing real anxiety over the delete function of his word processor. He talked about envisioning all those deleted words and letters, laying somewhere at the bottom of a dark pit hidden by the cover. While it was funny, he also was expressing very real consternation and anxiety over the forced changes in his own perception of what text actually is, how it's created, and what we can do with it.

In the introduction to The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, a collection of essays published in 1993, Richard Lanham said:

For the changes brought by electronic text, including the very redefinition of what a "text" is, touch upon practically every central question on the current humanist agenda. The volatility of electronic text, its mixture of alphabetic and iconic information, and its essential typographical plasticity, seem, much more than film, the perfect fulfillment of the Italian Futurists' desire to abolish the book in favor of a more dynamic medium.

Electronic text thus leads us to the many twentieth-century attempts to release language from the traditional rules print has dictated.

And electronic text has come much further, since then. How does this change what we do in a text medium, then? If, rather than a static object -- a book or a page -- text is dynamic and liquid, what practical challenges and considerations arise? And what possibilities?

One of the most exciting things that happens is that text is entirely set free of any specific temporal place and physical location. This paper I'm reading right now can be poured, essentially, from screen to flash drive to page, and later I'll go home and post it on my own blog. It's liquid.

Just the overwhelming variety of modern fonts, instantly available, is something John Gower could never have envisioned. And isn't it interesting that those same fonts that offer us an amazing range of choices also limit us in a way pen and ink do not, in terms of creating text as art? It's still a finite number. The way around that, of course, is to simply design our own fonts -- and we can do that now, too. Maybe it's still not calligraphy, but we can hyperlink the gloss to any esoteric terms, embed video and sound, animate the words themselves; and when we've finished all that, have a quick vanity-Google to see who has linked to us most recently.

That inherent flexibility of digital text creates a remarkable platform with which to parse complex ideas and examine the history of our language, art, and literature -- all the while reaching an audience that's both interested and participatory -- and in many cases will provide near-immediate feedback. Text in motion.

That's excellent news for medievalists, who have an unprecedented opportunity, then, to bring the past into the present in a nearly tangible and immediate way -- and capture the intimacy and immediacy of personal conversation in the permanence of text.

Essentially, the difference between a blog and "regular" website is a difference in container for text -- similar to the way this page, that browser, or the flash drive in my pocket are different containers for text. Blogs are characterized by features that we don't see in other websites, typically -- although more and more of those features are starting to cross over, as their value becomes ever more evident.

Meg Hourihan wrote an excellent early examination of blogging several years ago, called "What We're Doing When We Blog":

If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share -- the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.

Whether you're a warblogger who works by day as a professional journalist or you're a teenage high school student worried about your final exams, you do the same thing: you use your blog to link to your friends and rivals and comment on what they're doing. Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal, no matter what topic they approach. They can be characterized by their conversational tone and unlike a more formal essay or speech, a blog post is often an opening to a discussion, rather than a full-fledged argument already arrived at.

Characteristics in common, that differentiate a website from a blog (cribbed heavily from both Meg Hourihan's essay linked above, and Lisa Spangenberg's The Rhetoric of Blogging):

-- frequent updates: fresh content provides fodder for the social interaction we associate with blogs. Even if you have your comments turned off, a blog predicates on the idea that the same people will be following your thoughts from day to day, week to week. The comments feature allows those readers to respond, contribute, and interact with those ideas.

-- hyperlinks: Again, a blog is about conversation. The intersection and dynamic tension between various viewpoints, and the response and interaction between writers, whether those writers are reader-commenters or other bloggers.

-- timestamps: We're working with text that, again, has been released from the constraints of temporal and physical location -- a timestamp, then, offers an anchor to a specific context; a specific place in time to use as reference to the world at large. When a news article about a new archaeological discovery comes out, that timestamp offers a context for the environment in which you wrote your own response to that discovery.

-- permalinks: Beginning from the premise that a blog is liquid, flowing, constantly changing text -- a tiny current in the larger river of the net itself -- the permalink provides a reference point allowing a return to a specific previous point in that stream. It also allows other bloggers and respondents to link to that point.

-- RSS or other feed: Blogs typically have a feed that lets you subscribe. This is important because it means your blog-reader will go and fetch the text back to your own tool, you don't have to go out and find the site via bookmark and mouse clicks, then wait for it to load, in order to read. The text comes to you.

Those key characteristics of blogging allow for more flexibility and a much greater range of communication and interactivity than offered by a more fixed and static website. This flexibility and interactivity creates unique opportunities for scholars to introduce, discuss, and hone ideas; similarly, the immediacy and versatility inherent to blogging allows reader/audience participation on a scale and with a degree of engagement not always possible in a more formal or traditional academic setting.

And blogging is an amazingly egalitarian process. You don't have to be a scholar. People blog about the most amazing things - their kids, gardens, medical issues, cats, recipes, and knitting projects. The magic happens when we establish connections to like-minded souls, forming communities with a commonality of interests and passions.

Our audiences are motivated to be there, reading and interacting -- otherwise, they'll just close the window or click the next link on their reader. There is, then, a sort of inherent "survival of the fittest" built directly into this textual conversation: if you're boring, people don't come back.

That sounds alarming, perhaps -- but it's not really that bad. That dynamic provides some checks and balances. The presence of an engaged community provides us incentive to post, stay interesting, and say something fresh; while our readers have incentive to engage, participate, ask questions, and make observations. Readers who lack that incentive either "lurk" or drop away entirely -- leaving the blog with a community of actively interested participants.

That passionate, active interest combined with the inherent flexibility of liquid text creates a new classroom, also cut free from the moorings of time and place. There are, of course, some challenges too, then -- there's an amazing amount of crap on the internet, right? And how are we teaching people to differentiate? How do we convey the ever-growing requirement for critical thinking, that being the case? I don't actually have answers for that, other than we all bear individual responsibility to teach when and where we can, by example.

What an amazing time and place we're in, though. For example, I just encountered (through a link on Dr. Nokes' blog, Unlocked Wordhoard) a newish blog started by novelist Nicola Griffith, specifically for the purpose of research.

From the sidebar description of Gemaecca:

This is a blog about writing a novel. The novel is based on the life of Hild of Whitby. I intend to not contravene what is known to be known about those people and those times, but while I'm a good novelist (I've published and won awards for five) I'm an indifferent scholar. I'm going to need help. I don't think in footnotes. I don't remember references. I read a little Latin and I've picked up a smattering of Old English (enough to pick out a word or two) but I'm much more at home with translations. My hope is that those who know more than I do about seventh century Britain will be generous enough to share their thoughts from time to time. Meanwhile, I'll share my process, that is, to the degree that it's comfortable. I don't usually discuss works-in-progress; if it turns out to be too uncomfortable, I'll fold my tent quietly and steal away.

This is a remarkable thing. When and where in history have we had the sheer access to information that we now have, let alone the ability to intersect and interact with one another about that information, without waiting months for letters and pictures from across the country -- or across the world? Anything we're interested in Google will fetch right to our fingertips in an instant. A passionate interest that takes our search deeper will provide weeks, months, or years worth of reading; then blogging allows us to either join or establish a community just as passionately interested in engagement with the subject, creating a dynamic conversation captured in text that's both liquid and permanent.

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2008-03-21T09:15:00.001-07:00

Puget Sound.

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2008-03-21T09:14:00.001-07:00

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2008-03-21T09:00:00.001-07:00

Unloading.

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2008-03-21T08:55:00.001-07:00

Acres of flowers.

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2008-03-21T08:47:00.001-07:00

Morning at the Pike Place Market.

2008-02-17T20:21:00.000-08:00

Stories

Truths on Loose Leaves - Toby Wallis

Retinue - Adrian Simmons

Distant Destinations - Michael McNichols

Sandwich Street - Kurt Kirchmeier

A Feast of Leftovers - Patricia Russo

Poetry

Triumph XVIII: Maya - Shweta Narayan

Since it came up in the comments...

2008-02-08T20:32:00.000-08:00

There are a couple of responses to this weeks AW Newsletter editorial. Since not everyone who reads the blog reads the newsletter, I'm going to repost the editorial, here, sans only the salutation:

The daffodils are poking up through the mulch, very bright young green against the perpetual gray of the Northwest spring weather.

I've been looking at the plum trees in the yard, thinking I need to prune them. It always feels so wrong to me to prune a tree as aggressively as the fruit trees seem to prefer. The horses got their first worming of the new year, and all their feet trimmed. They're still fuzzy with Winter coats, though, and seem like they will be for a while.

I'll be going to the caucus for my voting district, Saturday, since the Dems aren't planning to count the primaries in Washington state. Since I'm hardly a shrinking violet about my opinions, I've been talking politics wherever I go; so it is I've met a number of folks (elderly or else young mothers, most of them) in my district who need a ride to the caucus - so I'll be spending a good part of the morning with Google maps, so I can pick people up on the way.

Whoever your candidate might be, I can't encourage you strongly enough to do something to support him or her. Our system may indeed be gravely flawed, but it's the system we have to work with.

While Absolute Write has never done anything like an official endorsement (just the idea makes me laugh at myself) I'll be voting for Hillary Clinton, Saturday, and trying to talk everyone I encounter into doing likewise. There are a number of reasons I prefer her to Obama: she has actual experience in contrast to Obama's hopeful-but-empty rhetoric (attractive as his oratory skills may be) and I think we've had quite enough of the conflation of wishful thinking with reality, the last eight years.

We don't have to passively accept anything we're told, just because some pundit on TV said so. We don't have to believe and trust our favorite bloggers, even, without investigation. We can think. We can read. We can research and examine and struggle with ideas. It's tempting to give in and feel as powerless as the media would like all of us to believe we really are -- but we don't have to do that.

Me? I can and will write. I do have a voice, and so do all of you.

I'm going to leave you with some links to folks who have articulate and insightful things to say about it all:

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/

most especially

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/011889.php

Sharp words about the Dems' "circular firing squad":

http://www.groupnewsblog.net/2008/02/taking-my-ball-bat-and-going-home.html

And still more:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/all-you-need-is-hate/

http://www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=26942

From Erica Jong - a terrific writer:

"As a senator she has learned compromise and negotiation. She has gotten to know red America as well as blue. If she could win over the rednecks in upstate New York, she can win over any American. She knows this country is full of "security" moms as well as soccer moms. Since she is a woman, she has to show she's ready to be commander in chief. Hence her "triangulation" on Iraq and her signing the absurd Lieberman-Kyl resolution, which calls on our government to use "military instruments" to "combat, contain and [stop]" Iran's meddling in Iraq.

[ . . . ]

"I understand my hopeful friends who think an Obama button will change America. But I'm sticking with Hillary. I trust her because all her life, her pro bono work has been for mothers and children. And mothers and children -- of all colors -- are the most oppressed group in our country. I trust her to speak for our children and grandchildren -- and for us. She always has."

And finally, from an essay by Robin Morgan that I can only wish I'd written:

"Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both parties. I support her because her progressive politics are as strong as her proven ability to withstand what will be a massive right-wing assault in the general election. I support her because she knows how to get us out of Iraq. I support her because she’s refreshingly thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly 'uniter' with ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s -- and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president.

"As for the 'woman thing'?

"Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am."

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/020108.html

Get involved with your world, folks. Write hard -- because it's what we do. Write true -- because otherwise, why bother? And always, always, write on.

best,
MacAllister

And if you're interested in more reading, HRC, from 1995:

And finally, this is from an HRC speech in 1969:

"There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word 'consequences' of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid.Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now." [Emphasis added]

Multimedia message

2008-02-07T22:47:00.001-08:00

Multimedia message

2008-02-07T19:39:00.001-08:00

No apathy here.

Multimedia message

2008-02-07T19:31:00.001-08:00

Clinton rally, Seattle.

The Big Horse Posts, collected

2008-01-11T08:22:00.000-08:00

I'm going to stash this here, because I've had occasion to link to it over and over again, the last few years. Better to store it all in one place, I'm thinking.
_________________

I got a pm asking an excellent question--and bringing up an issue that has made me roll my eyes more than once, when reading a story with horses. I thought I'd repost my response here, with a pared-down version of the original question:

Quote:

1. a) What's a reasonable maximum daily distance that you could expect a horse and rider to travel in a day, assuming that the same horse is ridden for a week or two straight and you don't want to ride the horse into the ground? ... b) Would riding double decrease that distance significantly?... c) Would bringing a remount increase that distance?

That's actually a pretty complicated question, with a ton of variables that can make a difference. Terrain, size and breeding of horse, what kind of gear, stirrups or no, etc.

I rode endurance (extreme distance racing) for a number of years, and trained endurance
horses for a living, and in my experience 20-25 miles a day is going to be a fairly sustainable average, actually, for most people and for most horses. Less, if you're crossing undeveloped terrain, on trails or cross-country.

Terrain, horse breed, proficiency of the rider, and available feed and water is going to drastically
change times and distances. If you check out the Western States Run and the WS Trail Ride, over the same trails, a human running on foot can cover the same 100 miles nearly as fast as the winning horse/rider pair. (It takes the guy on foot about an hour longer.)

Figure for long distance stuff, in moderate terrain, a fast horse, pushing hard, will cover @ 15 miles an hour. An average horse will cover 8-10 miles an hour. The further you go, the more complicated it gets trying to hold your horse together, though.

note: A short sprint is an entirely different pace!

A more leisurely pace would be completely understandable, for standard travel--say cut the above times in half, and cover ground walking and trotting. In that case, if you do slow down, you have an easier time keeping your horse alive and sound (not limping) It would be entirely reasonable to ride 35-40 miles in a 8 to 10 hour day, with a break or two. Not for the faint of heart, though. It's gonna hurt, unless your riders are accustomed to all those hours in the saddle.

One rider with light gear on a fit horse can cover 25-30 miles in about 4-6 hours at a fairly steady trot with some cantering and some walking, to break up the pace--figuring in at least one hour-long rest period . . . you can do that daily, without much trouble, indefinitely. Again, taking as given that the horse is fit, not a horse who has stood in the pasture unworked for months. Also, remember that the more consecutive days you travel, the slower you need to go.

We know this was about average, because the California missions (and many early European towns, for that matter) are located what was considered a day's travel apart -- which ranges between 22-26 miles, roughly.

Your hypothetical rider will spend most of his time "posting" a trot -- from the word "postillion" -- here's a decent description of the technique, if you'd like. It's pretty much the most efficient gait for distance traveling. The Pony Express riders went much faster, but the horses did not have to go out on consecutive days, and they ran in relays so they didn't have to cover as many miles.

Add a remount, and the rider can cover nearly double the ground, without much trouble. If only traveling for 6-7 consecutive days, you could do that on two horses, resting when completely exhausted, and reasonably cover 80-100 miles a day, on roads and good trails; 50-60 miles a day, cross country and on trails; or 20 or so miles of steep terrain with good trails.

But with steep terrain, deer tracks to follow or no trails at all...you'll be lucky to make it 5-10 miles. An extra horse is almost a liability in that situation, and won't really increase your speed or distance.

Add a 100 lb person riding double, you can probably get away with 25-30 miles a day, for 5-7 days . . . but you'll have a very tired horse, trying to go lame, and getting cranky about being saddled. Also probably getting quite sore over the loins.

A horse bred to trot will go more efficiently and even faster, a standardbred or arab, say 25 miles in about 3 hours-- 50 miles in 6-7 hours (that's riding time only, you'll have to figure in at least a brief rest for the horse every 2-3 hours, with a big drink (ideally) and something to eat, even if it's just a few mouthfuls of grass -- but that's going to be pushing pretty hard, and you can't do that day after day. Not at those speeds.

On a rangy, athletic, fit horse, bred to trot, it would be entirely reasonable to cover 40-50 miles a day (counting time to rest) for a week or so, in 10-11 hours a day before needing to have some time off.

The horses bred for endurance can cover around 100 miles in about 12-16 hours (again, just on average) but cannot do so day after day--would need several days to rest afterwards, or you're risking metabolic failure or lameness. (carrying around 190-200 lbs)

A heavier horse (draft or draft mix, like you'd expect of a horse who carried a knight in armor, for instance, will take longer, and need more frequent rest stops. Also, a heavier horse won't stand up well to longer distances than around 40 miles.

__________________

Quote:

2. When you stop for the night, what would you do in the way of horse care? Unsaddle, rub down, blanket (?), check hooves? High energy food if you've got it?

Hydration is actually a big factor--horses will go into metabolic failure fairly quickly, if they become dehydrated and over-fatigued. So you're looking for food and water all day, along the trail. You don't pass water without drinking...ever. You try to let your horse grab a couple of mouthfuls of grass, whenever you can spare the time.

When you put him up for the night, you'll check him over for sores or galls caused by the gear, you'll wipe him down with water (warm if you can get it) to take off the crusted-on sweat and dirt. If you can't get a sponge or rag to rub him down, you're going to brush and curry and brush some more, until his coat is clean and smooth.

You'll check his legs for nicks, heat, swollen places, etc., you'll check his shoes for rocks, and to make certain they haven't slipped or loosened...(if he isn't shod, cut the above distances in about half--cuz he'll wear his feet off too fast, otherwise) note: there are, of course, exceptions to this generalization--the Comanches rode unshod horses for staggering distances. There's an old saying about how far a cowboy, a Mexican, and a Comanche can ride a horse without killing it.

Wish I could remember precisely how it goes.

You'll give him a high-energy ration, soaked, if possible...probably a mix of corn and oats (up to around 10-12 lbs), and then you'll follow with all the good clean hay he wants to eat, and likewise, you'll make sure he has free access to clean water all night. if you can beg a fistful of salt to throw in his grain, all the better.

Yep, if you have a wool blanket, toss it over him--unless it's hot enough outside that he'll sweat with the blanket on. It's that much less energy he has to expend to keep himself warm.

Now - one of the more specific questions I've received:

Quote:

Here's my scenerio, It's 1864-65, something like that. A Young woman, around 28 I think, is riding across IT (Indian Territory) toward Arkansas with her daughter (about 5 or 6). They don't have much in the way of gear, just what she could tie on the two horses (she didn't want to take a pack horse, probably because she didn't have one). She isn't following a trail, but she is taking time to try to hide her trail. She is being tracked by two men who start out at least 2 maybe three hours after she does. About how far can she travel and how soon can the men catch up to her.

This is what I was thinking, she leaves headed east (the way they expect her to go) they follow her 2-3 hours later. She turns north about the time the men start out. They miss where she turns north at first and lose about 30 min. looking for her trail. About an 1 1/2 hours later she angles back to the southwest (toward the town she left) then in another hour or so she turns back toward the east.

What are the chances she can do all of this in one day, without them catching up to her? And how many times will she have to stop for more than 5 min. for her daughter, and her, to rest and stretch?

How far does she have to get? If the two men are two or three hours behind her, and having to follow hidden trail, unless they are better-than-average trackers, they aren't going to catch up real fast...following trail takes a bit of time, you have to dismount, sort out footprints, etc.

Kids on horseback actually fare better than adults. If I had a five or six year old daughter (what's that 60-70 pounds?) and was an smallish-to-average-sized young woman, I'd ride double with the kid (she's old enough to ride behind me and hold on) leading one horse to trade off when the first got tired.

I'd also keep to either roads (where you can't very well sort one print from another) or rocky, hardpan sorts of surfaces. The creek trick you see in books and movies is all well and good, except sooner or later you must come out again, and riding down the middle of a creek you make much slower time than on regular, firm surfaces, and it's hard on the horses' stamina. Where you come out will be fairly obvious, even if you use a handy gravel bank.

If the woman is a good rider, with a constantly more-or-less fresh horse, she could actually increase the distance between her and her chasers.

If she's used to riding, then she won't have to stop for longer than to water the horses, and she and her daughter can stretch their legs while the animals water and graze--say three or four 10 minute stops over the course of the day. The followers will also have to rest their horses and water, or risk having their horses drop out from under them.

With a two hour head start, and a spare horse? These guys are actually gonna play hell catching up, if she knows what she's doing at ALL, especially if she pushes on after dark. They'll have to stop when the light gets too bad to follow her trail. If they are very good, and push very hard, they might catch her sometime in the afternoon or early evening, the following day.

Does she know she's being followed? Or is she hiding her backtrail because she's in hostile territory?

If, on the other hand, the plot requires that they DO catch her, then she just needs some bad luck to slow her way down--a lame horse would do it, unless she just cut it loose.

____________________

More reading:

And if you're curious about distance riding, and up for a little further research, check out:

http://www.aerc.org/ and http://www.endurance.net/

A horses in fiction discussion.

Another horses in fiction discussion.

About mules.

A decent FAQ about mules.

About packing in on horses and mules.

The Care and Feeding of a Mortal Mount (well-known Rumor Mill essay)
There are a few inaccuracies, but it's mostly good information. The author clearly isn't a long-distance rider, but for a long time this was one of the most-linked resources for writing about horses on the 'net.

Julia's Horse Fax is another good resource specifically for writers.
__________________

I hope this helps, and good luck!

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-24T17:14:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that I love Christmas. One of the things I love most is the sense of continuity -- of human beings who love and laugh and hope and celebrate, year after year; century after century.

When the darkness seems deepest, and the nights are longest and coldest, there is hope, symbolized by a Yule log, or candles, or simple gifts to each other. Then the year tips, and the nights grow shorter and the sun returns, bringing hope and warmth and new crops.

That the story of the birth of a child in Bethlehem has inspired generation after generation of people to try to be kinder, truer human beings. That we're reminded each year at this time to love one another as we love ourselves. To be kind to our neighbors. That miracles happen in simple, humble ways and places, but extraordinary all the same.

That we all, at heart, look towards light and hope and being better people.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I'm humbled by your continued presence here, and I'm honored to know you even in small ways.

The Holly and the Ivy : Lyrics

Play Music !

The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown
Of all the trees that are in the wood
The holly bears the crown
O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly bears a blossom
As white as lily flower
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To be our sweet Saviour
O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good
O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly bears a prickle
As sharp as any thorn;
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.
O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly bears a bark
As bitter as any gall;
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to redeem us all.
O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly and the ivy
Now both are full well grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.
O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

New Coyote Wild!

2007-12-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

Stories

The Ladies - Elizabeth Bear

You know - I'm not convinced history didn't happen just this way -- The Ladies is a subtle story, marked with Bear's deft word-smithing and wry sense of humor.

And Now Abideth These Three - Sherwood Smith

It's always tricky to describe any Sherwood Smith tale - "Luminous" is always the first word that comes to my mind, and this story absolutely glows. First published in Realms of Fantasy, in 1998, slightly edited.

Marsdog - Beth Bernobich

A romping homage to some of SF's classics, with a flavor all her own.

The Heart of Winter - Emily M. Z. Carlyle

A tale for a long winter's night by the fire. This is one of those breathtaking and lovely stories that fairly demands to be read aloud to a rapt audience.

Last Star - J. M. McDermott

A strong, sure, fast-moving story of the end of everything -- and the beginning.

Lighthouse at the Edge of the Universe - C. A. Casey

A nautical tale about skirting the shoals of the far future.

Hobgoblin Crush - Maria Deira

Twisted good fun.

_________________________________

This may be my favorite issue so far. These are some really terrific stories, and I'm awfully happy to announce that the 'zine will go monthly, as of Volume 2.1 - scheduled to go live January 15th, 2008.

Stuff to Read Today

2007-12-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

Via some of the smart, charming, good-looking people who populate my LiveJournal F-list:

The Christmas Campaign:

"Why a Christmas Campaign?

"In recent years some media pundits and 'culture warriors' have waged a vocal campaign against a so-called 'War on Christmas.' Targeting department stores, local governments and school systems for replacing Christmas with 'Happy Holidays' or 'Seasons Greetings,' Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson of Fox News have led the charge against what they call a 'secular progressive agenda' determined to drive religion out of the public square. William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights warns of 'cultural fascists' bent on destroying Christmas.

"The real assault on Christmas, however, is an excessive consumer culture that has turned a holy season into a celebration of commercialism and materialism. By focusing our attention on shopping malls and the consumerism that accompanies Christmas, this misguided campaign further distracts us from the real message of the holiday..."

___________________

Dismaying news from Terry Pratchett:

AN EMBUGGERANCE

"Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom 'stroke'. . ."

___________________

The History of LOLCats

"Historian Ben Burrns brings us through this history of LOLCats. Did you know that 26% of all emails contain a LOLcat photo?"
___________________

The Poet who could smell vowels:

"'In French we write the same vowel four different ways in terrain, plein, matin, chien. Now when this vowel is written ain, I see it in pale yellow like an incompletely baked brick; when it is written ein, it strikes me as a network of purplish veins; when it is written in, I no longer know at all what colour sensation it evokes in my mind, and am inclined to believe that it evokes none.'

"When Saussure associates ain with an incompletely baked brick, it is hard not to think of the prototypical baked good, and one of the two most common French words to contain ain. Although pain (bread) is not mentioned, it too is a pale yellow when incompletely baked. When ein strikes him as a network of veins, this time the word used to identify the visual association is present – veines – though while the letters ein are there, in this word they are not pronounced with the vowel he is discussing. If in evokes nothing, could that have to do with in- being a negative prefix? Or with in being the stressed vowel of his given name, Mongin, which he never used?

"He continued:

"'So it does not seem to be the vowel as such – as it exists for the ear, that is – that calls forth a certain corresponding visual sensation. On the other hand, neither is it seeing a certain letter or group of letters that calls forth this sensation. Rather it is the vowel as it is contained in this written expression, it is the imaginary being formed by this first association of ideas which, through another association, appears to me as endowed with a certain consistency and a certain colour, sometimes also a certain shape and a certain smell.'"

___________________

Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'

"Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years."

___________________

It's a strange, frightening, and marvelous world we live in, and these are interesting times.

Another intermission

2007-10-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

Coyote Wild is pleased to announce our new issue:

Autumn 2007 Volume One Issue Four

Fiction:

Elephants Never Forget - Jennifer Brinn

You don't have to be a swashbuckler to be a hero.

The Greatest Adventure of All - Ian McHugh

"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause . . ."

Elvis and Gretel in the Woods beyond the Railroad Tracks - Matt Betts

Just be glad the King doesn't invade your own favorite fairy tale . . .

Engendered Species - Greg Story

Don't be askin' questions 'less you really, really want the answers.

Mirror, Mirror - Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy

Sometimes the jouney home takes such a very long time . . .

Nightmare at the Nursing Home - Jenny Schwartz

This rollicking twisted short takes a poke at the standard genre cliches.

Pearl of Great Price - James Steimle

What price, knowledge -- and how do you unlearn what you wish you didn't know?

Sea Child - Aliette de Bodard

Elegant. Evocative. Enduring.

Toxicity - Erica Naone

When the very air is slow poison, where do you go for respite?

Photomancer - Bartholomew von Klick

A picture can haunt you for years.

Uluru - Jennifer Linnaea

Another kind of journey, altogether.

Nonfiction:

A Chainsaw-Wielding Yankee in King Arthur's Demonic Court - Richard Scott Nokes

A concise and excellent examination about what we're still learning about ourselves through those once and future stories that echo of Camelot.

Poetry:

What You Should Call Us - Elizabeth Barrette..

You'll hear the gentle ching of harness bells, the muffled thud of hoofbeats and the shouts of Traveler children, long after the last line.

The Fruit Vendor - J.C. Runolfson

Simple. Timeless. Unblemished.

Frances Glessner Lee,
Mother of Forensic Pathology
- Lisa M. Bradley

Fun, educational . . . and more than a little creepy.

_____

I'm really, really delighted with the quality of the pieces, and couldn't be more pleased with the resulting Fall issue.

Hope you like it, too.

best,
Mac

The Magical Other and Misogyny

2007-10-13T19:17:00.000-07:00

Other is a dangerous thing to be.

Other is a dangerous to everyone else, and dangerous to the poor soul judged to be other.

Some links for you:

Fairies Kill Four Villagers
(and the Archive's press release)

People took this stuff very, very seriously.

_________________________________

Bridget Cleary: Fairy Intrusion in Nineteenth Century Ireland
Lisa Spangenberg relates the untimely death of Bridget Cleary:

In March of 1895 Bridget Boland Cleary was a trained seamstress, with a good eye for fashion, who owned her own Singer sewing machine. She lived with her husband Michael Cleary and her father Patrick Boland in a small cottage in Ballyvadlea, Tipperary, Ireland. Michael, like his wife, was atypical in that he could read and write; he worked as a cooper. In 1895 they'd been married about eight years; Bridget was 26, and Michael was 35. On the fifteenth of March, Michael Cleary, believing his wife Bridget had been taken by the fairies and that they had left a changeling in her place, having spent three days in various rituals that were intended to force the changeling to leave and bring his wife back from where the fairies had taken her, set fire to her. He and nine others of Bridget Cleary's relatives and neighbors were tried for her death.

_________________________________

Let's Watch a Girl Get Beaten To Death
Joss Whedon's well-linked rant:

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death?

_________________________________

"The Sky Isn't Evil. Try Looking Up."
The excellent PNH's take on the Joss Whedon rant, linked above. TNH posted this in the illuminating and vigorous comments thread:

The question of whether or not you're respectable is a subtext in these interactions. The game goes like this: if you're a good girl, you'll be confused and upset by what they're saying. If you're not a good girl, you're fair game. I once heard Annie Sprinkle say that until prostitution is legalized, no woman will be free. This struck me as true at the time, but it took a long time for me to tease out the implications. One of them is that as long as there are women who are outside the protection of the social contract, all women are threatened with reassignment to that category.

_________________________________

Not Your Erotic Not Your Exotic (with thanks to Laura Mixon for the link)
An eloquent, angry, and articulate blog post:

I read Vox Ex Machina's post entitled "Help Iraqi Women" in which she covers, with disgust, a site called International Sex Guide.

I clicked on the link above and read some from white men telling other white men about "hitting" and "banging" women of color in Iraq, Mexico, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, India, South Africa ... and on and on ...

This sh*t is violent. Demeaning. Colonial.

This is a war.

_________________________________

We've not even talked about witches, yet. For that, I'm going to return briefly to one of my own posts from about a couple of years ago:

I give you Sarah Wilds. She was, by some accounts, a somewhat wild young woman. She'd been arrested twice for lewd behavior in the past.

One of those arrests was for wearing a bright scarf.

The Salem arrest warrant for Sarah (and others included in the same warrant) reads:

Salem Aprill the 21'th 1692 There Being Complaint this day made (before us) by Thomas putnam and John Buxton of Salem Village Yeomen, in behalfe of their Majest's for them selfes and also for severall of theire Neighbours, Against Wm Hobbs husbandman and Delive' his wife, Nehemiah Abot Jun'r weaver. Mary Easty the wife of Isaac Easty and Sarah. Wilds the wife of John Wilds all of the Towne of Topsfield.

This all gets quite depressing, after a while. Especially when you can open any newspaper and find another story that would fit right in, here.

So there's an odd tension happening here, right? First, the hints that sexuality forms the real issue. Otherness is hawt. Wild and unfettered and somehow much sexier and more exotic . . . something as small as a brightly-colored scarf can mark you as other.

And it's okay, appealing and naughty, even, as long as you're not too other. Then you're still sexy, but you probably are too dangerous to actually fuck. And look at the accompanying language around otherness and sex -- it's very much the language of violence.

And it's on a gradient, right? The more other Bridget Cleary gets, the more independent, the more self-sufficient, the longer she remains childless -- the more other she seems. Remember the newspaper article linked, a couple of paragraphs ago? "The party's discriminating tone harkens to the day of the 'brown paper bag test,' which compared the complexions of blacks to a brown grocery bag before they could be admitted to social clubs and affairs, said Pearl Jr." It's titillating and sexy to be just other enough. But too far beyond the pale, and you're a threat.

Let's look at TNH's observation again, shall we?

"As long as there are women who are outside the protection of the social contract, all women are threatened with reassignment to that category."

Too much other, and you're a whore. A slut.

Or worse, yet -- Queer.

More on all this, soon.

And now, a brief intermission

2007-09-10T20:54:00.001-07:00

Read this, please. It's really, really important.

I've long argued that the real philosophy behind much of the anti-choice rhetoric is really, truly, deeply misogynistic, and it's about denying women the most basic control over their own reproductive systems.

The Republicans balking about Plan B, I think, supports that contention.

Part III, or, The Magical Other

2007-08-27T02:13:00.000-07:00

Part I - Magical Negroes, Expendable Queers, and other well-worn tropes
Part II - MN, EQ, etc

First, to address a couple of the points that came up in the comments, so they don't get lost:

Eileen Joy said...

Eileen here: I'm a lesbian, gay, queer, whatever. I am not one of those nifty straight people trying to hijack queer-ness in order to be theoretically hip. Far from it. Look carefully at what I am writing [I hope--could be wrong, though, because we can always improve our arguments] and I think you will see that I am: first, arguing that "queer" can never divorce itself from "woman," which will always--on a cultural level, anyway--be the foundation of "queer" [in the eyes of, say, the most hetero-normative communities]; and second, arguing, mainly following Elizabeth Grosz [a feminist, I might add] that, evolutionary-biological-wise, we are, all of us "hetero-queer" [produced through endlessly transmogrifying yet partially dimorphically fixed chains of sexual difference]. Desire has never been about sameness--I reject categorically the term "homosexual"--it is frankly insulting to those of us labeled as such. Being "homo" does not mean desiring "the same," and even if it did: how boring. [typo fixed - Mac]

12:56 PM

[Note from Mac: (Here's a bibliography for Elizabeth Grosz, by the way, for those of us less familiar with modern feminist critical theory and philosophy than Eileen.) If you're interested, here's an essay available online: "Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism."]

Okay -- from the comment: I think you will see that I am: first, arguing that "queer" can never divorce itself from "woman," which will always--on a cultural level, anyway--be the foundation of "queer" [in the eyes of, say, the most hetero-normative communities]; and second, arguing, mainly following Elizabeth Grosz [a feminist, I might add] that, evolutionary-biological-wise, we are, all of us "hetero-queer"

Right -- that's all well and good, as far as it goes. The problem is, it doesn't go far enough. So let's push the idea a bit, eh? The idea that the concept of queer cannot be divorced from the perception of woman, and therefore fear of queerness = misogyny, has been around very nearly as long as I've been alive, at least. It goes in sort of chicken-and-egg circles, though, unless you can introduce something new into the equation.

To find something new there, we're going to have to make some extrapolations, and maybe even a leap or two. That is, we have to get to the "So what?" part and apply the raw idea in a way that it has relevance. We can do that. And maybe we can do that without the academic-speak wanking that mostly just serves, frankly, to obfuscate the discussion.

Eileen points out that one way to push the idea is to assert, as feminist Elizabeth Grosz does, the "hetero-queer" spectrum "produced through endlessly transmogrifying yet partially dimorphically fixed chains of sexual difference" which is a start -- but not all that helpful, honestly, in terms of defending the relevance of the assertion that "queer" cannot be divorced from "woman."

I would assert, by way of explanation, that while queer = other, and woman = other -- and indeed the two are therefore inextricably related -- both concepts function as facets of sexuality, and sexual otherness. That is, this is all rather bigger than academic feminism. This is art and life -- or more specifically, in terms of literature, it's all about sex and death. This is where squick and squee live, and like the Jungian shadow-self we touched on with Ishmael and Queequeg, there's no getting away from it. Which, I think, is what Eileen Joy and Eizabeth Grosz are both getting at (just neither quickly nor directly enough to suit my own impatient nature.)

To put it plainly, and then work backwards: This all strongly suggests that we are all other.

Grosz said in an interview:

. . . the thing is that acts don’t have an "other." Only Subjects have an "other," and in a way, that’s partly the advantage of the Deleuzean model over the Hegelianism or psychoanalysis, in which there can’t be a self without an "other." Therefore the "other" has a peculiar control over the subject and the subject has to negotiate with the other as its compromise for existing in a world peopled by others. The beauty of Deleuze’s model is that it’s not clear that we need an "other" and, if there is one, we have no capacity to master this "other."

To restate: "The beauty of Deleuze’s model is that it’s not clear that we need an 'other' and, if there is one, we have no capacity to master this 'other.'"

The tension around mastering the other has worn a lot of different faces, as long as humans have been writing stories down. Ultimately, the way this plays out in our literature is that part that's most interesting to me, because it's reflective of the way we've thought about it all, and how the way we talk about it, and write about it, is changing and evolving.

I rather think Grosz states it upside down. It's not that there is no other. It's that there is no us.

The fear and tension and need to master other is about seeing ourselves "through a glass darkly" and the inherent terror of that confrontation. To be other is to be inarguably outside the bounds of the safety of community acceptance -- whatever that community may be.

That is, other is all about sex and death. For our purposes, other is how we examine and define our squick and squee.

(And here I'm going to crib shamelessly from myself. You can find the original posts here, and here -- but here's the part pertaining to this discussion:)

Aristotle asserted in The Poetics, "Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies." (IV)

That's about squick. It's important. It's also a complex concept. Exciting and engaging stories can find my squick button, without actually pushing my face in it--it's related to the Blair Witch Project phenomenon, whereby that which is unseen is so much scarier and ickier than anything seen clearly--but you can't help looking anyway.

There are ancient human aversions as powerful today as ever--fiction gives us a tool to examine those hot-buttons, safely. So Aristotle is pretty clearly onto something real when he talks about catharsis--even though the word itself isn't present in The Poetics:

Quote:

Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means; but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way, and indicates a superior poet. For the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes Place. This is the
impression we should receive from hearing the story of the Oedipus. But to produce this effect by the mere spectacle is a less artistic method, and dependent on extraneous aids. Those who employ spectacular means to create a sense not of the terrible but only of the monstrous, are strangers to the purpose of Tragedy; for we must not demand of Tragedy any and every kind of pleasure, but only that which is
proper to it. And since the pleasure which the poet should afford is that which comes from pity and fear through imitation, it is evident that this quality must be impressed upon the incidents.

We might say, now, "you gotta get the audience where they live." Which is as true of Stephen King as it was of Homer or Sophocles. That is, for a piece to work, it has to find that universal human truth that sets up a sympathetic resonance between poet and audience, so that the piece forces the listener or reader to feel something real, or the memory/shadow of something real. This is where the magic happens, and suddenly there's something happening that transcends all the fine points of plot structure, diction, characterization, and unity.

Aristotle talked about catharsis in terms of music, in Politics, so we know he thought about it. The etymology of the word says a lot about how he thinks this all works: "catharsis from Gk. katharsis "purging, cleansing," from kathairein "to purify, purge," from katharsos "pure."

From a decent essay about the Poetics:

Quote:

The word catharsis drops out of the Poetics because the word wonder, to rhaumaston, replaces it, first in chapter 9, where Aristotle argues that pity and fear arise most of all where wonder does, and finally in chapters 24 and 25, where he singles out wonder as the aim of the poetic art itself, into which the aim of tragedy in particular merges. Ask yourself how you feel at the end of a tragedy. You have witnessed horrible things and felt painful feelings, but the mark of tragedy is that it brings you out the other side. Aristotle's use of the word catharsis is not a technical reference to purgation or purification but a beautiful metaphor for the peculiar tragic pleasure, the feeling of being washed or cleansed.

This section the Poetics is particularly relevant in terms of squick and squee buttons. In fiction, for instance, a successful piece of writing can find your squick button and make you like it -- because it's ultimately about human truth: we're attracted and repelled by the blood mingled with rain on the pavement and the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles, because "oh my god that could be me..." but then, to push it even a step further, "and what is that thing crouched in the driver's seat . . ? And is it eating . . . ohmygod it is!"

That's the "pity and fear" part of the reader/writer exchange -- empathy and identification.

When a written work gives that to us, it's enormously gratifying. We can try out these emotions in a safe context, and we understand ourselves and the world all the better for it.

Let's return to this quote from The Poetics: "Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated." (IV)

Aristotle takes as given the concept of art imitating life, or mimesis, and the Poetics is primarily preoccupied with the mechanics of how that works, and how a poem or song or play or painting is made--and what constitutes success. And if indeed, poetry (or fiction, now, since we've broadened our understanding of story) is about imitating life, then it very much is a process of discovery, right?

Because at its very best, a story says something true. Or rather, more accurately, something True. That truth is already existent and external to the not-yet-created text. It just is. That means it's got to be something intrinsic to human experience -- something we all can know, and acknowledge, and can understand--even if it's at first unfamiliar. At some point, we should recognize, "Ah, yes. I know this truth. This is exactly how it really is."

Because the truth the story or poem tells to us is already there. It exists, with or without the frame of the words and the story. The more perfectly framed and expressed, though, the better the imitation. The more perfect the picture not just of the world inside the story, that is, not just the constructed details of economics and clothing and characters and landscape--but of something much more abstract and important, something humanly True--the more perfect that word-picture, the more accessible the underlying and informing reality becomes.

That brings us to Kip's comment:

kiplet said...
Damn, Mac. And here I am in Ashland in the early sleepy morning, about to see Mercutio tomorrow, and thinking, as usual, about the dam’ good neighbors. You deserve more than I can give, at the moment.

But: the Magical Negro isn’t always about the good and dead equation. There’s also something of an apology there (a self-serving apology), and something of an excuse or justification (though pathetic tea at both): see? They do have power! Though it’s power that doesn’t work so well in our dominant context of lawyers, guns, and money. (Perhaps because it’s so earthy and rhythmic. But it is authentic, and authenticity can be useful, sometimes.) And see? They are nice, and kind, and mild. Though we’ve treated them badly in the past, they don’t so much mind. They have forgiven us. Why, our horrible crime isn’t so horrible after all! Hooray!

Of course, it’s never you do have power, you have forgiven us. Wouldn’t work so well, if one addressed the object directly.

We don’t yet so much have Magical Queers perhaps because there’s not yet enough of a collective sense of shame to crystallize into a limiting, stereotypical trope that allows us through hack storytelling to feel better or at least less worse about the horrible things we’ve done. (The good and dead equation still holds, here, Nick’s point nothwithstanding.) —Though: it’s easy enough to find the queerness in magic (in the specific sense of sexual other), from berdaches to Tiresias. Perhaps because the sexual other has always been found, even within one’s tribe, but the ability to have and hold a racial other, closely enough that its implicit threat must be subsumed but not obliterated, is with isolated exceptions a much more modern phenomenon?
7:37 AM

There are a couple of things I want to specifically address in what Kip is saying. I suspect he's very smartly seen immediately where this is all headed -- but he brings up a couple of questions.

But: the Magical Negro isn’t always about the good and dead equation. There’s also something of an apology there (a self-serving apology), and something of an excuse or justification (though pathetic tea at both): see? They do have power! Though it’s power that doesn’t work so well in our dominant context of lawyers, guns, and money. (Perhaps because it’s so earthy and rhythmic . . .)

Why is it, though, that the Magical Negro doesn't ever survive the end of the story, then? The trope character pretty reliably either dies (Mother Abigail from The Stand) or else vanishes as mysteriously as s/he arrived.

So, no. I don't think it's actually changed that much. I think it's just trying to burrow underground, out of the light of social and cultural change.

Perhaps because the sexual other has always been found, even within one’s tribe, but the ability to have and hold a racial other, closely enough that its implicit threat must be subsumed but not obliterated, is with isolated exceptions a much more modern phenomenon?

Actually, I'd assert that racial other is essentially about sexual other. And I think Kip pretty clearly knows that. Let's look again at his sentence from the last point, " . . . see? They do have power! Though it’s power that doesn’t work so well in our dominant context of lawyers, guns, and money. (Perhaps because it’s so earthy and rhythmic . . .)"

Wise ass.

Errr, well yes. All that "earthy, rhythmic" stuff is terrifying unless you have a really big gun with which to compensate.

In terms of examining other, then, we've been constructing stories from the beginning of storytelling to explain and examine the threat to our communities from Outside. That threat is specifically sexual in nature. That's how other works our squick buttons and our squee buttons at the same time, and why we just can't put it down.

In part IV, we'll finally leave off all the introducing of ideas, and take this to some of those stories themselves, as illustration of what we've been talking about so far. Magic is very queer stuff indeed, and always has been, in pretty much every sense of the word.

Magical Negroes, Expendable Queers, and other well-worn tropes, part II

2007-08-23T09:36:00.000-07:00

I'm swiping a large chunk of this from a (an? Depends on if you say "ell-jay" or "livejournal" in your head while you're reading, I suppose) LJ post I wrote a few weeks ago. I've edited pretty heavily, though, and added rather a lot. So my apologies if you already read the first version -- I'll try not to test your patience.

Part I is here, in case you're just joining us. If you'd rather not wade through it, here's a brief summary:

Other is a term to describe the phenomenon of the outsider, particularly in fiction, who represents some kind of threat to the community -- but often, also serves as the agent for the community's salvation/redemption.

Familiar examples of other from stuff you've read or seen: Queer characters, like Tara in BtVS; Brown characters, especially as the highly-refined Magical Negro; Women, in almost anything pre-1900; Gypsies in any fiction I've ever seen them appear in; Fairies, in pretty much any fiction that takes them seriously -- but especially in medieval texts.

When we left off, last, I'd just started discussing the Eileen Joy essay, found here.

Now, we're going to skip ahead a bit again, though.

Fast forward, again:

A month or so after K'zoo, I had an interesting and lively discussion with Dawno and Medievalist over Irish coffees in a Hilton bar about the Magical Negro trope in fiction.

Here's a brief definition..

Magical Negroes are always outwardly or inwardly disabled. They are either from a minority that is discriminated against, physically or mentally disabled, or social outcasts (drifters, the homeless, ex-cons)....whose magical minority-powers save the day. It also tends to raise the question that if the Magical Negro is so powerful and intelligent, why he's never saving the day, himself, instead of helping the mainstream hero to get all the glory. Also, quite often he's just ditched off or even killed after he's fulfilled his purpose for the plot.

We had some disagreement, as could be expected, over whether these stock characters were merely tropes, or actually characters in their own right; primarily, the discussion focused around which well-known black characters from books and film were and weren't Magical Negroes, and why.

Then, in one of those serendipitous coincidences that sometimes happen (remind me to post about my Indian Paintbrush Theory, sometime) a few days later Elizabeth Bear posted an entry mentioning the same thing. She wrote:

The clearest example of how this solution could work that I can think of off the top of my head is the so-called magical Negro, which is a phrase used to describe a situation where the (white) protagonist has a (black) mentor figure who is inevitably snuffed in the third reel. (You may substitute the Other of your choice in the magical Negro role, above: Apache shaman, wise old Jew, creepy witch woman, Inuit medicine man, cute nonthreatening gay best friend... you know the character, right?)

...the difference between Ben Kenobi and a magical Negro is that Ben is not Other to everybody else in the film.

And that's also the solution, right there. Because if you only have one of something, it automatically becomes a poster child. You only have one black guy in the movie? Oh, man, we know he's gonna die. Same thing with one queer guy (Heroic gays always die! It's a law! It's how you know they're heroic!). One woman is the love interest, and she will either stand by her man or betray him. And she might also die.

Wellllll....sort of. Other differences between Ben Kenobi and the Magical Negro are that Ben isn't a jobless, homeless wino. Or in prison. Or working as a janitor. And Ben has a past, alluded to as part of the back story; he doesn't simply appear, full-grown, with no explanation other than the protagonist's greater destiny is served by his presence. He also isn't the only character in the story who possesses mystical powers.

There's something rather more complicated to the actual Magical Negro trope, I think. It's not exactly the same as a token (disposable) sidekick of minority race or persuasion.

Here's another interesting thing: Magical Negro characters don't usually get to have sex. They aren't married, or romantically involved. They usually don't have children, or families, or real people who love them. In fact, they often appear out of the mists, full grown, like Bagger Vance.

This contrasts sort of strangely with the token queer character who does get to have sex -- even if only offstage -- who is in fact defined by the sex s/he has, and usually gets killed, messily, often apparently as a direct result.

At this point, I start thinking to myself, "hmmm, self, there's something going on there, about other sex." It seem clear that either extreme -- no sex, no family/shocking sex=death serves strictly to exemplify the specifically sexual threat of otherness . . . a threat that can only be answered by neutering or killing the practitioners.

From the (pretty decent at the time of this posting -- subject to change weirdly, randomly, and without notice) Wikipedia entry on the subject:

...black characters with apparent supernatural powers who are portrayed as independent, who have a level of power roughly equivalent to that of other characters, and who are not subservient to whites — such as Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) in Star Wars, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in the Matrix series, and Storm (Halle Berry) in the X-Men — are not usually considered weakened magical negroes; nor are helpful non-white characters without some magical or fantastical element.[2]

...Even though they may play a central figure in a storyline, they are portrayed as being unable to solve challenges without the involvement of a white associate.

In other words, there's more at work here than ordinary tokenism -- plenty of which abounds.

Kip Manley, partially in response to the original posting of this essay, further examines the ideas of both the Magical Negro and the arbitrary knee-jerk offing of queer characters, beginning with a brief examination of Morpheus from The Matrix.

Kip writes:

Oh, hell, let’s chase the red herring for a minute. I’ve got time; I’ve got nothing but time. —So: no. Morpheus is not a magical negro. If nothing else, his touchingly stubborn faith in Neo, which sets him at odds with the magical Oracle, which causes us to doubt him (though we never doubt he’s right: Neo must be the One—look at his name!), and which even causes him to doubt himself—this grants him a degree of agency and protagonism that sets him apart from the mere role of wisely aiding and abetting Neo’s enlightenment. (To say nothing of his captaincy, his popular acclaim in Zion, or the fact that he’s the one who lives to tell the tale—)

Kip uses that as a jumping-off place to examine Romeo and Juliet's Mercutio, specifically in the context of the Baz Luhrman version:

Ostensibly Romeo’s foil, Perrineau’s Mercutio practically foils the whole damn film, othered to his very gills: the only black character, his gender bent in an otherwise rigidly stratified world, his sexuality—well. Even the lightest brush of those buttons with Mercutio—witty, articulate, prancing Mercutio, always a snappy dresser—leaves little room for doubt. —Forever outside the discourse of both those houses, he pushes and pulls and chides his charge until Romeo sees the light and gets off his goddamn ass, and as far as magic goes, well. Queen Mab, bitches. Those drugs are quick.

So we've some definite and demonstrable tension with regard to the conflation of other types of characters. Other = queer. More on this, too, when we forge ahead into part three.

In the meantime, though, we have an observable trend. The subservience, outlandishness, and neutering of other characters works to ameliorate the subconscious sense of threat that their otherness might represent to the reader. The implication, then, is that the threat is justifiable, otherwise the need for the trope falls apart.

Let's look at Stephen King's John Coffey character, in The Green Mile. John Coffey is a childlike but extraordinarily powerful black man, wrongfully imprisoned (and shown more than once literally in shackles) who nonetheless exists, apparently, only to make the (white) characters' lives better, the protagonist and secondary white characters, both.

He's been imprisoned for a particularly horrific and brutal child rape/murder, of which he's innocent. He's physically large -- freakishly so, in fact. The reader knows intuitively and instinctively that the other characters in the novel are legitimately afraid of him. It doesn't have to be spelled out for us, because contextually, it's very clear: John Coffey is very big, and very black. In addition, he's caught weeping over the bodies; it's only natural for the characters to figure he's guilty of something horrible. Now, there's some sub-textual commentary happening, too, of course -- I think King clearly attempts to point out, "look, stereotypes bad..." especially in contrasting the messiah-like figure of John Coffey with the very clearly guilty, dangerous, and truly frightening (white) characters "Wild Bill" Wharton and Percy Wetlow. Unfortunately, it serves instead to underscore the fact that the real power in the novel lies in whiteness -- which John Coffey exists only to serve and never be.

It's clear that if John Coffey decided to stand up for himself and function independently, the white characters would be in deep trouble. Instead, though, he's a lawful good sort of a character. And lawful good, in his case, is defined as self-sacrifice to help out the apparently less-powerful-but-white characters -- even the legitimately convicted criminals -- with acts like curing urinary tract infections and restoring Mr. Jingles, the mouse that Percy the prison guard stomps to taunt one of the other prisoners.

Coffey's great power exists, apparently, only in the context of service of his white captors -- who, in turn, seem to bear no responsibility or culpability for his situation. Instead, they're absolved of their participation in his imprisonment and execution.

Strange Horizons ran an essay that provides an excellent overview of the Magical Negro device as used by Stephen King, online here.

In The Green Mile, Coffey is most gracious. "'You and Mr. Howell and the other bosses been good to me,' John Coffey said. 'I know you been worrying, but you ought to quit on it now. Because I want to go, boss,'" he says near the end to Edgecomb. Coffey basically thanks his jailers who have not questioned his guilt until it's too late and done nothing to help him get out of jail (until Coffey cures the warden's wife) or even convince him to try.

None of this would have worked, if John Coffey had been a white Ben Kenobi character. We couldn't/wouldn't forgive Luke and Leia, had they participated in Ben's imprisonment, mental torture, and execution. For that matter, if the Coffey character had been female and black, even, the reader reaction to the culpable white characters would perhaps have been very different.

Rita Kempley, on The Black Commentator points out:

Cedric Robinson, author of "Black Marxism" and a colleague of Bobo's at UCSB, says, "Males, more problematic in the American imagination, have become ghostly. The black male simply orbits above the history of white supremacy. He has no roots, no grounding. In that context, black anger has no legitimacy, no real justification. The only real characters are white. Blacks are kind of like Tonto, whose name meant fool."

She goes on later to clarify, "It isn't that the actors or the roles aren't likable, valuable or redemptive, but they are without interior lives. For the most part, they materialize only to rescue the better-drawn white characters. Sometimes they walk out of the mists like Will Smith's angelic caddy in 'The Legend of Bagger Vance.' Thanks to Vance, the pride of Savannah (Matt Damon) gets his 'authentic swing' back."

It has to work that way, because that's the only way we can justify the treatment of these characters at the hands of the protagonists they exist to serve. If the Magical Negro isn't a shackled character in service, then he's too threatening to exist in the story.

From the Strange Horizons article linked earlier:

Here are what I call the Five Points of the Magical Negro; the five most common attributes:

1. He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters.
2. He or she seems to have nothing better to do than help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.
3. He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist.
4. He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above.
5. He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.

The archetype of the Magical Negro is an issue of race. It is the subordination of a minority figure masked as the empowerment of one. The Magical Negro has great power and wisdom, yet he or she only uses it to help the white main character; he or she is not threatening because he or she only seeks to help, never hurt. The white main character's well-being comes before the Magical Negro's because the main character is of more value, more importance.

Let me emphasize this part:
"The archetype of the Magical Negro is an issue of race. It is the subordination of a minority figure masked as the empowerment of one. The Magical Negro has great power and wisdom, yet he or she only uses it to help the white main character; he or she is not threatening because he or she only seeks to help, never hurt."

At risk of sounding like one of Bear's "3 % who are professionally offended" I think this is a key difference, and an important one. I honestly don't think the writers and filmmakers who employ the trope are inherently racist or bigoted, at least not any more than we're all steeped in that bigotry as products of our society. But I do think we all have a responsibility to identify, mock, and eradicate culturally embedded racism.

There's an inherent morality lesson built into thematic tropes that show up again and again. There's a thing that happens when certain characters always, always die. In the case of queer characters (Tara in season six BtVS, anyone?) the lesson comes across loud and clear, "see what happens to dykes and faggots? Get the message?" And in the case of the Magical Negro trope, it looks rather queasily, to me, like "the only really good nigger is a dead one."

So let's be plain. Let's look unflinchingly at the tropes and cliches we go along with, nodding, without actually looking directly at the mostly unspoken lessons they contain.

This brings us back to the Eileen Joy essay linked at the top. She writes:

While queer theory could be said to have begun with specific human and even posthuman bodies—with their indeterminate and illicit flows and intensities and, let’s say, their once-unspeakable and subversive desires—queer theory today, in the recent words of David Eng, has become “subject-less,” admitting of “no fixed political referent.”[5] As a term, queer cannot be allowed to stray from what might be called its essential contingency, in the sense that it must always pose a certain resistance to whatever is considered fixed or “normal,” an ontological state of affairs that is always changing over time. In this sense, queer studies is about everything, and even, following Carolyn Dinshaw’s lead, about “touching” and making queer “affective contact”[6] with everything: it is about sex and sexuality as always, but it is also about race, religion, empire, immigration, globalization, citizenship, sovereignty, terrorism, etc. And in another sense, queer theory is also now about the end of everything we think we know, about sex and sexuality and human bodies, but also about history and time.

That's the heart of the matter, really -- and the trickiest, most prickly bit to get around if you're writing from a place on the margins to begin with. That queering of everything rankles on a number of levels if you're already inextricably tangled in queerness in its more strictly defined sense.

Interjected note: I've never used this blog to beat my Big Gay Drum -- and I'm not, frankly, about to start now. So if you're here for that, you'll be disappointed. If you're not here for that, I expect you're relieved. And that, all by itself, is deeply revelatory of the sorts of internal tension dynamics we're going to be further unpacking, in the next chunk.

Again, this is getting long for a blog post -- so I'll let it rest here, for now, and I'll see you again in a few days with part III.

Magical Negroes, expendable queers, and other well-worn tropes

2007-08-19T06:22:00.000-07:00

By Way of Introduction -

I've been thinking about this post for a long time. There's this thing about specfic that allows us as writers and readers, both, to thoroughly examine themes of other, in ways that other literary traditions simply don't flex to accommodate. When you turn the idea of other on its head the way specfic can, you get some pretty interesting and disturbing stuff -- like Ursula Le Guin's Hugo-winning "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." (Available in The Wind's Twelve Quarters.) [ETA: I originally included a link to the story itself, but upon a bit of investigation discovered it was not an unauthorized use. Ms. Le Guin still retains copyright, and while I don't know her, I can't imagine she's fabulously wealthy. Writers generally don't get rich from writing -- please don't support intellectual property theft.]

Other isn't a terribly hard concept, even if you don't consciously recall encountering the idea. If you've ever read a book or a story that features token gypsies, queers, brown people, or even (oftentimes) women -- you've already encountered other. It means just what it says: other than. Other than white. Other than het. Other than us ("us" being a sort of weird unspoken default setting that means, in an awful lot of modern traditional Western-European and American writing, white, heterosexual, and male. We can argue male-as-cultural-default some other time, but I think I can make a pretty strong case for it.)

So Other isn't that tricky. You might have got this stuff in high school English classes. (I didn't -- but I went to an insanely conservative private Christian school -- friggin' all everyone was other.) If you've had a survey Lit course, you've almost certainly heard of it. If you've had a Women's Studies, Queer Studies, or Writing from the Margins class at some point, the concept will be downright familiar and comfy.

Some of literatures most enduring and beloved characters are most empathetic to us because of their own alienation from the safe place of cultural conformity, but they aren't really other. Rather, they occupy a space between -- and almost inevitably, they're trying to get from here to there (there being safely accepted as part of a community.) Other in fiction carries a pretty specific hint of magical threat.

You see the magical threat of otherness in the appearance of fairies, in medieval writing; in the appearance of gypsies, monsters, or queers, in fiction all the way to present; essentially, you can identify other in any character that cannot or will not every be reconciled with the portrayed cultural community, no matter what she or he does over the course of the story. Think of Queequeg, in Moby Dick. (Forget, for the moment, all the Jungian shadow-self stuff that requires we think of him as a dark reflection of Ishmael -- whose very name implies alienation. But you just gotta know we're coming back to it, later . . . )

Ishmael says of Queequeg:

I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, i confess i was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.
(page 21 in the linked edition)

Queequeg's never, ever going to be mistaken for a New Englander. He's other . . . and that's scary. Worse yet, Ishmael is supposed to share a bed with him -- which is a source of discomfort for Ishmael for a number of paragraphs before he ever lays eyes on Queequeg.

Now, as a lesbian who has been out -- a self-identified dyke, in fact (and, yes, I can almost feel some of you cringing because I used that scary word. It's okay, I promise) -- I know a bit about being other. I know more than a bit about seeing that otherness reflected in text across generations and genres. In fact, though, it's often tremendously educational to read as if we weren't on the margins, to learn what we can from the experience from the perspective of someone safely within culturally-identified norms.

Fast forward.

Some of the thinking for this essay started this spring, on my way to Kalamazoo, Michigan for the 42nd Medieval Congress. If you should ever have the chance to spend a couple of hours in a car with Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Digital Medievalist, I highly recommend the experience, by the way.

We were talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'd just started methodically watching the DVD collection, having missed the whole BtVS phenomenon, when it actually happened. Someone casually mentioned that Tara dies.

Now. I was only partway through season four, at the time of the discussion, and while spoilers don't typically bother me, I was shocked and appalled to learn this bit of information. I sort of stashed it away, to look into later.

Fast forward, again.

Upon my return from K'zoo, in the context of a discussion regarding some of the presenters, Medievalist sent me this link, and asked me what I thought.

From Eileen A. Joy's Beyond Feminist, Gender, Queer, Everything Studies: Notes Toward an Enamored Medieval Studies:

. . . While queer theory could be said to have begun with specific human and even posthuman bodies—with their indeterminate and illicit flows and intensities and, let’s say, their once-unspeakable and subversive desires—queer theory today, in the recent words of David Eng, has become “subject-less,” admitting of “no fixed political referent.”[5] As a term, queer cannot be allowed to stray from what might be called its essential contingency, in the sense that it must always pose a certain resistance to whatever is considered fixed or “normal,” an ontological state of affairs that is always changing over time. In this sense, queer studies is about everything, and even, following Carolyn Dinshaw’s lead, about “touching” and making queer “affective contact”[6] with everything: it is about sex and sexuality as always, but it is also about race, religion, empire, immigration, globalization, citizenship, sovereignty, terrorism, etc. And in another sense, queer theory is also now about the end of everything we think we know, about sex and sexuality and human bodies, but also about history and time. . . .

Not knowing in advance what precise forms our humanness does and will take—this is the point at which, unlike a certain famous medievalist, I am not going to “get medieval on your ass,” but I am going to “get manifesto” on you. I believe that we inhabit a present moment of what I take to be a kind of crisis, at the national level, in what I am going to call hetero-queer (re)productivity, a state of affairs in which a certain sterility of radical human becomings—both experiential and critico-philosophical—has settled in at precisely the same time as the entertainment industry and other corporations have taken over anything that ever did or ever will call itself “radical” and have sold it to us as the best acid trip ever.

"Oh, yippee," sez I, "Encourage the straight white chicks who love the idea of queerness, but only without any of the accompanying painful, horrible, soul-searching, overcoming-self-loathing bits. or the part where strangers call you 'fucking dyke,' sometimes under their breath but not usually. WTF is a 'hetero-queer?'"

This is getting long, so I'll leave you to read the essay. I'll be back with the next chunk in a day or so, and if you're an overachiever, and really wanna read ahead, here's a links round up:

In the Middle

Gays/Lesbians in the Media

The evil, dead lesbian cliche

A list of where you can see the evil, dead lesbian cliche in action

On Heterosexual Writer Bias

Unpacking the Magical Negro trope

Magical White Boy

The Kugelmass Episodes on BtVS

Inexplicably Fancy Trash

Part II of this essay, if I've not bored you silly already.

I'm back!

2007-07-29T09:31:00.001-07:00

Ten, the mighty hunter. And I'm working on a long and substantive essay.

Multimedia message

2007-05-25T17:49:00.001-07:00

I <3 Seattle

Pippin the Wondermutt 199?-May 1O, 2OO7

2007-05-16T12:08:00.001-07:00

I shall miss him.

Free speech free-for-all

2007-04-02T03:12:00.000-07:00

There's a blog I read sometimes, Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users. Recently, though, I've been bogged down with other obligations, and haven't been keeping up with any of the blog-reading I normally do. So when Digital Medievalist pointed me at this post, I was completely gobsmacked.

And not in a good way.

I don't read a lot of IT blogs -- the geek culture is way over my head, and I don't move in those circles, for the most part. One of the very nice things about Kathy Sierra's blog is that it's cheerful, optimistic, and the language is accessible. So it was both horrible and confusing to see her so distressed, and perplexing in the extreme to try to comprehend what sort of raving lunatic would post death threats and graphic and disturbing images about Ms. Sierra in the comment-threads on another blog site (since removed by the owners.)

Last week, Ms. Sierra wrote: "As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I'm not. I'm at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I've been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that's not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs... blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers."

The story has continued, and there's apparently been some resolution between the involved parties. Here are the links:

Frank Paynter's response

Chris Locke's original response

Ms. Sierra posted this morning:

"But these stories should not be about me... I am simply one of a gazillion examples about what's happening today both on and offline. Nor is it a simple Nice Vs. Bully story, and I thought having us come to an understanding would encourage others to stop fighting on either of our behalves and try to listen first, and then talk, and maybe something good and useful really will come of this.

"Although I've learned a lot in the last few days, I still do not know who made the unclebobism photo post, or why, or whether that person is a real threat. That part of the story has continued to devolve in even scarier ways.

"So, this is the last post I'll make for some time, and I've closed comments because I cannot keep up with the hateful ones (including those that post my home address and social security number, etc.)"

Since the whole thing blew up last week, there have been a variety of responses on blogs everywhere, ranging from a complete lack of anything resembling sympathy and understanding as to why it's frightening and horrible for anyone to see comments like: "fuck off you boring slut... i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob" to Tim O'Reilly's call for a blogger code of ethics.

What I want to talk about are these key bits from the Kathy Sierra/Chris Locke joint statement
posted yesterday.

Quote:

KS: We've become so desensitized to vile comments on the net that many people can't comprehend why I would feel threatened. But if we dismiss every cruel, vile, sexually threatening comment as simply the work of an anonymous troll, we will no longer be able to recognize a real threat. Are we willing to stake our mother/sister/daughter's life on a sexually and physically threatening photo or comment, simply because it appeared on the internet and therefore must be harmless?

That said, Chris and I are in complete agreement that it would be tragic if this incident were used as a weapon by those who would limit free and open exchange. My desire is for much more open debate on this issue, not legislated limits.
____________

CL: There is much more to say about this experience that can't be unpacked in such a brief statement. There is time yet for more balanced articles to be written, less heated conversations to take place. Misogyny is real -- and vile. Violence against women is wrong. It must not be tolerated. This issue should be explored and discussed, not swept under the rug, not rationalized away. At the same time, we need to look closely and carefully at the implications for free speech. The First Amendment allows and protects language that many find noxious. But there are forces in the world at present -- not least in the US -- that would leap at any opportunity to limit speech or even abolish certain forms of it. Crucial as is the current debate about hate speech directed at women, it would be tragic if this incident were used as a weapon by those who would limit free and open exchange.

Tim O'Reilly points out:

There's an attitude among many bloggers that deleting inflammatory comments is censorship. I think that needs to change. I'm not suggesting that every blog will want to delete such comments, but I am suggesting that blogs that do want to keep the level of dialog at a higher level not be censured for doing so.

There are many real-world analogies. Shock radio hosts encourage abusive callers; a mainstream talk radio show like NPR's Talk of the Nation wouldn't hesitate to cut someone off who started spewing hatred and abuse. Frat parties might encourage drunken lewdness, but a party at a tech conference would not. Setting standards for acceptable behavior in a forum you control is conducive to free speech, not damaging to it.

We do all have our trolls. (I'd wave at mine, here, but I don't think they actually read anything I write.)

And there's something that happens to some people, sometimes, when they feel fairly anonymous and angry at the same time -- and they go right off into the stratosphere, foaming at the mouth. Blogs have been home to a number of such skirmishes. Hell, I've had numerous shots taken at me, from other blogs--nothing approaching death threats and photo-shopped pictures with nooses--but certainly the occasional incoherent rant with sort of vague "or else" kinds of threats. (Not going to link. Entertaining as it might be, they don't actually deserve the traffic and can't get it on their own.)

So. How do we find the balance? I think good people have to speak up, when things go to hell in a comment string. I think we have to self-police. I think, when someone says something that's clearly horrible and inflammatory, we stuff 'em in a box. Embarrass them. Shame them into either adhering to community standards, or exile them by deletion and/or blocking.

This means that our individual communities need to have standards, though -- so the resulting gestalt of the blogosphere in general will gradually begin to reflect that more individualized culture of responsibility. It seems rather overwhelming, if you look at any statistics at all about how fast new blogs are popping up, let alone podcasts and vlogs.

Which means that we must take responsibility for our own words wherever we are on the web. And stop excusing those who don't. And when someone does something actually egregious and illegal, we cannot dismiss it with, "Well, it's the internet. People talk trash. It doesn't mean anything."

Because words do have meaning.

Sunday Links Roundup

2007-03-18T05:44:00.000-07:00

No special reason. And no plans to make it a weekly thing, even.

Here's some of the stuff I looked at this week, in no particular order:

Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet - essay

Questionable Content - web comic I'm completely addicted to for no reason I can explain or identify

Nietzsche, Plato and Aristotle on Mimesis - essay

The Captured German Records Collection - WWII German records

The Religious Movements Page - alphabetical listing with a brief history and summary of religious movements from Adidam to Zoroastrianism

Hailes Castle - Medieval Scottish ruin

Strange Horizons - SF ezine, I rather liked "We Will Not Go To Memphis, Then" which has a strong American poetry flavor, but handles subject matter reminiscent of King's The Stand

A Dictionary of Middle English Cooking Terms - Just what it sounds like. With recipes!

Cheers!

Spring!

2007-03-01T01:55:00.001-08:00

So, I almost put the windows back in . . . But this really should be winter's last gasp. I brought 'em with me just in case.

Rainy February Night

2007-02-20T02:11:00.000-08:00

I just had the oddest conversation with the graveyard guy at the 7-11 where I usually stop when I'm out wandering around in the wee hours.

I've been stopping in there pretty regularly in the middle of the night for at least a couple of years. The graveyard guy is teaching himself better English by reading old magazine articles. (I dunno where he's from. Somewhere away where people are browner and speak a language that leaves itself marked in English with a musical, lilting accent.) Because it's the middle of the night, there's time to talk about the things he's been reading. Over the last several months, he's taken to underlining words to ask me about, and dog-earing the stories that confuse him or leave him with questions. If I haven't been in for a couple of nights running, he's usually got quite a stack of articles marked up, and a middle-of-the-night 7-11 run can take a good hour or so.

Tonight, he wanted to puzzle through some of the words in an old Newsweek article about Astronaut Lisa Nowak's 900 mile trek--and double check that he had the details and sequence of events straight in his head. But mostly, he wanted to know if I thought it was true. There were a great many more pictures in the print version of the story, including pictures of Nowak and her husband and children. He pointed at the picture of the two little kids, incredulous, and asked if I believed the story.

I wasn't sure, at first, quite what he was asking. In fact, he simply wanted to know if this brilliant and talented woman had indeed thrown away her entire life and career and family for a guy who didn't want her. The diaper thing, the disguise, the pepper-spray in the parking garage--none of that really concerned him, other than as part of the narrative chain of events. He saw straight through the bizarre details to the very human tragedy underneath.

The 7-11 guy is already reading better than a great many American-born English speakers I know. And frankly, he's reading better than many would-be writers I know, too.

Revisiting II

2007-01-27T00:49:00.000-08:00

I'm still rediscovering poetry--verses I read years ago, but they ring all the more true for having gained some age and knowledge and experience.

This Emily Dickinson poem is read quite a lot. I think I actually encountered it as a child. Some of you will know it, I'm certain:

If you were coming in the fall,
I'd brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.
If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.
If only centuries delayed,
I'd count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen's land.
If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I'd toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.
But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time's uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.
--Emily Dickinson

Dickinson's direct and straightforward style couches powerful human emotion in simple terms that might tempt readers to underestimate her. One online biography points out:

"At times characterised as a semi-invalid, a hermit, a heartbroken introvert, or a neurotic agoraphobic, her poetry is sometimes brooding and sometimes joyous and celebratory. Her sophistication and profound intellect has been lauded by laymen and scholars alike and influenced many other authors and poets into the 21st Century. There has been much speculation and controversy over details of Dickinson’s life including her sexual orientation, romantic attachments, her later reclusive years, and the editing and publication of various volumes of her poems."

Emily's personal history mostly lays completely outside my consideration of the poem, honestly. If we just look at the text without speculating about who she might have written about or for, there are a couple of things I really, really like about this poem.

I love her appreciation for simple things--always have. This is a woman who finds beauty in the everyday, and that's just a lovely way to move through the world. This doesn't have the sort of galloping rhythm that some of her more-parodied stuff does, which is good. It's still structurally very tight, and there's that carefully and strongly-evoked sensation of time and seasons passing while she waits.

There's a sort of logic or reason puzzle built in, as well: if . . . then, if . . . then, if . . . then, if . . . then, if . . . then,

(wait for it)

But . . .

And the progression of seasons, years, even centuries is rational and orderly--and that portrayal of reason, logic, and order defied serves to contrast the emotional poignancy of waiting. She brings us back to that poignancy by the simple means of taking us from a hypothetical season, year, century to the intensely personal with, "If certain, when this life was out"--not just any life. This life. And with that, the more detached and almost amused tone changes to the much more personal and passionate.

But even so, with any poem I'm acutely conscious of the negative space; that is the things unsaid but invoked by the actual text are terribly important, too. So when we think about something like uncertainty and waiting, it really only makes sense in the context of certainty and that sensation of "at last!" and those elements, too, are strongly present in this piece.

So I very much read this as, yes, about uncertainty and waiting--but also very much about the beauty of knowing and the joy of anticipated arrival.

Snow...

2007-01-11T01:19:00.001-08:00

I keep meaning to put all the windows back in...but now it's nearly Spring, right?

I'd planned to write a long letter tonight...

2007-01-04T03:33:00.000-08:00

But here I am blogging, instead. Funny how the time gets away. It's already nearly morning again.

I've already written rather a lot tonight; I'm finding that the more words I'm putting down regularly, the more readily they come. At this point I can feel the words all crowding and pushing and wanting to rush out onto my screen, and I'm actually having to hold them back, a bit. Don't ask...just be grateful. Heh. A little less sleep and I'd be spilling words all over with little or no editorial control.

I'm not one for resolutions. Reflection, though...yes. This last year brought more change to my life, thinking, and writing than I could have believed possible. Good changes. I keep pausing to see if I should feel frightened or overwhelmed, and I just don't.

I've always been a fairly sunshiny person, and long subscribed to the belief that cynicism is bad mental hygiene. This the first New Year in a very long time, though, that I find myself looking forward to eagerly.

Welcome to 2007. It's going to be so damn much fun.

Revisiting

2006-12-27T03:33:00.000-08:00

I'd forgotten all about this. And the first time I read it, I really didn't appreciate it. I wasn't entirely a grown-up then, though--so I can cut myself some slack for missing it.

What texts do you revisit? What have you read, that years later comes up in the stray flotsam of your memory that you have to turn to again and reconsider from the perspective of greater age and better experience?

THE GOOD-MORROW
by John Donne

I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be ;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear ;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest ;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west ?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally ;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

You can find more John Donne, here.

Solstice Approaches

2006-12-21T05:16:00.000-08:00

Solstice.

However you spend the approaching longest night, may it find you safe, warm, happy, and surrounded by those you love best.

And as the days begin to lengthen again, may this New Year bring increase to your every blessing many times over.

To My Mad Comment Thread Vandal

2006-12-04T02:16:00.000-08:00

Look, friend, you can keep vandalizing my comments threads if you'd like--I'm old and curmudgeonly, and I don't sleep much anyway. I could enable comment moderation, but I don't choose to do so. It's easy enough to just delete that stuff.

Or we could have a conversation, instead. That's quite a grudge you're carrying.

Meanwhile, since you seem to like jokes, here's one for you:

Two hydrogen atoms are sitting and drinking together one afternoon. The first one says to the other, "I think I've lost an electron."
The other says, "Are you sure?"
The first says, "Yep, I'm positive..."

Take a second and click -

2006-11-26T04:19:00.000-08:00

Via Elizabeth Bear's LJ:

" Bristol-Myers Sqibb is running a click-to-donate promotion to fund AIDS research. One dollar per click-through, to a total of $100,000."

It's an annoying flash site. But they'll kick in another buck for research if you can bring yourself to wait while it loads. They're over the halfway mark, right now.

Scheduled Maintenance on Absolute Write

2006-11-25T01:40:00.000-08:00

Just in case you stop in here, looking for news:

The AW Water Cooler will be closed Sunday, November 26th, from about 6 am (PST) until we can get the databases transferred to the new server, currently running in an undisclosed co-lo facility. This exciting transfer necessitates a few hours of down time for the site.

Cross your fingers for us, and we should be up and better-powered hopefully by Sunday afternoon--but I'm telling everyone Monday, just in case of unforeseen complications.

Thanks!

I've been tagged

2006-11-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

From the last comment thread:

Zonk said...: ...you've been Tagged, :-]

You have to share 5 little-known facts about yourself, and Tag 5 other Bloggers to do the same. Blame Dawno, she started it, lol.

http://zonkzone.blogspot.com/

Ummm...okay. Here goes:

1 - I listen to opera. Not exclusively, but quite a lot.

2 - I'm a most excellent cook.

3 - I'm horribly nearsighted.

4 - I have absolutely no sense of direction. Seriously. I couldn't navigate my way out of a wet paper sack.

5 - I trained horses for a living for a number of years.

Tagging Wisdom Weasel, Pete Tzinski, Jason Evans, Secret Government Eggo Project, and Unique at Blowing Smoke. You'll note a couple of these blogs haven't been updated in a woefully long time. I dunno as a meme tagging will be sufficient to wake them up again.

Googling

2006-11-18T03:12:00.000-08:00

I love that google has become a verb.

I'll be googling far into the night, searching for folklore and myth concerned with people who have mismatched eyes.

It's a long story. Actually, it really will be a long story, but it's not quite clarified itself in my hindbrain, yet.

Any thoughts, knowledge, niggling feelings?

Jeep Update

2006-11-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

The jeep is running. Got the starter off with a cutting torch. They have aluminum housing, you know.

I've learned a valuable lesson about the proper tool for the job.

Heh.

Please Vote

2006-11-06T21:08:00.000-08:00

And if you're still not sure which way you're leaning in those close races in your district, here are some links about why you might seriously consider voting straight Democrat, this year. I've always voted for the person I thought would do the best job...this is the first time I'll vote a straight ticket, without so much as a second thought.

Here's part of why.

Making Light

Washington Post
--WaPo follow up article

New York Times

Daily Kos

American Chronicle

The Jeep Saga continues...

2006-10-29T23:42:00.000-08:00

Day 2:
I picked up the starter from the parts store. Hurried past the dead Jeep, eyes averted. Went inside to write, instead of fighting with rounded-off bolt holding starter to Jeep.

Day 3:
Pretended Jeep was fine. Worked on ms. Thinking I'm onto something--writing as avoidance activity...

The trick is to be avoiding something so assiduously that even writing is preferable.

Day 4 and 5:
Investigated more ways to remove bolt, once bolt head is useless. Hung out at autoparts store, picking over twitchy CarQuest guy's brains. Bought more tricksy bolt-extraction tools. Wrote some more.

Day 6:
Called Pater and whined.
Got one bolt out. One down, one to go. Victory!
Now it's only a matter of time.

I hate this. I hate working on cars. I loathe being cold and greasy.

Author Scoop

2006-10-24T12:39:00.000-07:00

So a friend of mine has undertaken an ambitious project. Haskins is a hell of a writer, a talented poet, and an all-around good guy. I wish him most excellent luck with Author Scoop.

And how can you not love a site that opens with collected reviews of King's latest?

Don't be a stranger, William.

A Peek Into the Writer Mind...

2006-10-24T00:25:00.000-07:00

My good-natured housemate has bemusedly observed on more than one occasion that it sometimes seems to take an awfully long time for me to accomplish what seems like a fairly straightforward task. I've been thinking about that, and realized I know precisely why. It's really easier to illustrate, than to explain, though. So, if you'll bear with me?

So the starter goes on my beloved twelve-year-old jeep, this week. I ascertain that it's the starter through tricksy diagnostics: It won't start, so I replace the several-months-expired battery, and that doesn't fix it; so then I consult Google, then spend some time lurking on the Jeep-Fixing Fora--yes, they really are plural--which leads me to believe the starter is the real problem. I'm here to tell you, though, those people badly need good tech-writers.

*note to self: must remember to put fresh candles on the Google altar.

Day 1--Since I consider myself a handy, mechanically-inclined sort of a woman, I decide to fix it myself. Also, the webpage I found most closely describing the symptoms said it's surprisingly easy to replace your own starter.

It seems like a good way to get some hands-on experience at something I'm only passingly familiar with--and that always engages my curiosity. I start wondering, at this point, about the etymology of the word "torque." Pretty sure it's Latin. Sounds Latin.

So I gather a mostly-complete socket set from the top of the dryer, the windowsill, my nightstand, the junk-drawer in the kitchen, and the tool chest in the garage, and go out to the driveway.

I pop the hood and spend some time staring at the engine. It occurs to me that this would be a much easier job if all those bits and pieces were clearly labeled. I start mentally composing a friendly and hopefully funny letter suggesting as much to the Jeep People. Back inside to google images for "jeep starters" and I run across an interesting essay about why I need to replace the solenoid, if I'm replacing a starter. More googling. The solenoid on a '95 Jeep Wrangler is apparently attached to the starter itself, so I'm golden. Print the clearest pic. Back outside.

Staring at the engine, identification picture in hand, I have a slowly dawning suspicion that the starter isn't going to be found from topside. Go inside to write draft of less friendly, less funny letter to Jeep People.

Nothing to be done for it. Back out to the driveway and wriggle under the jeep, behind the passenger side tire, to peer up into shadowy interior of engine compartment. Locate what was probably once the starter. At least, the shape is vaguely similar to that in the picture I'm clutching. Consult directions, and realize I was supposed to disconnect the negative terminal of the new battery. Wriggle back out. Spend some moments picking gravel from waistband. Disconnect battery, and spend self-congratulatory moment feeling totally chuffed that I didn't accidentally zap myself. Or run over myself. Or whatever Bad Things happen if one doesn't remember to disconnect the battery.

Crawl back under the Jeep. Stare into engine mass from bottomside, once again. Have brief daydream about being Scotty, aboard the enterprise. Say lots of stuff in terrible accent. "She's givin' us all she's got, Captain!" "I dinna think you should bang on 'er like that, Captain..." (I get to be Captain Kirk, too, now.)

I do manage to disconnect the battery from the starter and solenoid, though. Accomplishment!

Then things begin to deteriorate. The bolts actually holding the starter to the rest of the engine stuff have funny-looking heads. After some experimentation, I discover that a 3/8 hex-head socket will fit over the bolt heads, without obvious slippage. However, when I apply pressure (with a length of pipe slipped over the wrench handle for increased leverage, because those puppies ain't movin') the socket slips, I badly skin most of the knuckles on my right hand, and the bolt itself still hasn't budged. Now I begin mentally composing a caustic letter to the author of the webpage that claims this is "surprisingly easy."

I spend a long moment, then, thinking about Laura Mixon's lecture concerning "unconscious incompetence" and suppress premonitory chill.

No worries. I've got the battery disconnected from the thing, so I can just pick up the actual squiggly-looking socket I need, when I go purchase the new starter. Confident in my eventual triumph, I picture the engine smartly spinning and roaring to life. And off I go to CarQuest.

(Turns out the funny looking bolt heads take a Torx-head socket. I found out from the nice CarQuest guy who looked like he was trying very hard either not to sneeze or not to laugh.) They have to order the starter, but I'm okay with that, actually. I can wait til tomorrow for the inevitable flush of success and accomplishment. I believe in delayed gratification. Besides, I don't have the old starter off, yet, even.

The CarQuest guy tells me to bring the old starter back to them, and they'll refund my "core charge." I raise an eyebrow, because I know what the old starter looks like, and I'm suspicious that the core is actually showing, but agree. 60 bucks is 60 bucks, and who needs a big, filthy paperweight?

The twitchy CarQuest guy can't tell me the etymology of "torque," however. I promise to share it, tomorrow, after I've had a chance to look it up. He seems strangely disinterested.

Home I go, new sockets in hand, and crawl back under the engine. It occurs to me that I've gotten used to gravel down the back of my shirt and pants, which starts me thinking about human adaptivity, which gives me a proto-story idea. I consider stopping to jot notes, but decide to let it percolate a bit more.

So the Torx socket doesn't really want to fit on the bolt head I rounded off. A few sharp raps with a hammer, though, and it pops right on. It can only be a matter of minutes, I figure.

Twenty minutes of swearing and reinjuring my already insulted knuckles, and the bolt head resembles fossilized chewing gum. At this point, I quietly acknowledge to myself that a sane person would seek a Qualified Mechanic Guy. I, however, resolve to stick it out by reminding myself of the eventual sense of accomplishment, and the satisfaction of useful skills gained. Clearly, a bit more research is required, though.

Also, I'm still wondering about the etymology of "torque."

Back inside the house to google torque, because I can't stand not knowing.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1) - Cite This Source
torque [tawrk] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation, noun, verb, torqued, torqu‧ing.
–noun
1. Mechanics. something that produces or tends to produce torsion or rotation; the moment of a force or system of forces tending to cause rotation.

2. Machinery. the measured ability of a rotating element, as of a gear or shaft, to overcome turning resistance.

3. Optics. the rotational effect on plane-polarized light passing through certain liquids or crystals.

4. Also, torc. a collar, necklace, or similar ornament consisting of a twisted narrow band, usually of precious metal, worn esp. by the ancient Gauls and Britons.
–verb (used with object)
5. Machinery. to apply torque to (a nut, bolt, etc.).

6. to cause to rotate or twist.
–verb (used without object)
7. to rotate or twist.

[Origin: 1825–35; L. torquēre to twist; (def. 4) F. torque L. torques torques (torc perh. <>

Yep. Latin. I'm pleased.

Also, it turns out there's another tool you can use, just to remove big friggin' bolts without viable heads.

I'll let you know how it all turns out.

Pass it along.

2006-10-02T01:52:00.000-07:00

From Making Light. Feel free to pass it along, with attribution and a linkback to the original souce.

Thanks.
__________________________________________

ATTENTION US MILITARY PERSONNEL
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 12:05 AM * 10-2-06

You are not required to obey an unlawful order.

You are required to disobey an unlawful order.

You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The Constitution states (Article VI):

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Here is article 3, the common article, to the Geneva Conventions, a duly ratified treaty made under the authority of the United States:

Article 3
In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:
1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) Taking of hostages;
(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
2. The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.
The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.
The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.

Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions is straightforward and clear. Under Article VI of the Constitution, it forms part of the supreme law of the land.

You personally will be held responsible for all of your actions, in all countries, at all times and places, for the rest of your life. “I was only following orders” is not a defense.

What all this is leading to:

If you are ordered to violate Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, it is your duty to disobey that order. No “clarification,” whether passed by Congress or signed by the president, relieves you of that duty.

If you are ordered to violate Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, this is what to do:

1. Request that your superior put the order in writing.

2. If your superior puts the order in writing, inform your superior that you intend to disobey that order.

3. Request trial by courtmartial.

You will almost certainly face disciplinary action, harassment of various kinds, loss of pay, loss of liberty, discomfort and indignity. America relies on you and your courage to face those challenges.

We, the people, need you to support and defend the Constitution. I am certain that your honor and patriotism are equal to the task.

This post may be quoted in full. A linkback would be appreciated.

________________________________________________

To our everlasting shame...

2006-09-30T04:04:00.000-07:00

This is what waterboarding looks like.

From the article:

The similarity between practices used by the Khymer Rouge and those currently being debated by Congress isn't a coincidence. As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

Bottom line: Not only do waterboarding and the other types of torture currently being debated put us in company with the most vile regimes of the past half-century; they're also designed specifically to generate a (usually false) confession, not to obtain genuinely actionable intel. This isn't a matter of sacrificing moral values to keep us safe; it's sacrificing moral values for no purpose whatsoever.

Please remember when the time comes to vote that a vote for a Republican is a vote for torture.

It's not a vote against Queers Ruining Marriage.
It's not a vote for Family Values.
It's certainly not a vote for Smaller Government, or Fiscal Responsibility.

It's a vote to torture human beings. To deny Constitutional rights even to American citizens, should the government choose to label them terrorists.

Go take a look at the pictures. We're already doing this to people. Our federal government just voted to make it legal, and to make government employees immune to after-the-fact prosecution, for doing it.

"I was just following orders" is apparently a valid defense for war crimes, now--if you wrap yourself in the flag, first.

Formative Reading

2006-09-07T01:51:00.000-07:00

When I was perhaps eight or nine years old, I happened onto a battered copy of Theodore Sturgeon's collection of short stories, E Pluribus Unicorn, and promptly read it from cover to cover--then immediately went right back to the first page and read it all again.

Now, I don't know as I could comfortably recommend Sturgeon to the parents of most pre-teens, but I don't know as I wouldn't, either. They're sort of disturbing, odd, and discomfiting pieces of writing. I remember one story about a teddy bear that was really a sort of vampire alien, for instance, and I've never looked at stuffed animals quite the same way, since. On the other hand, how scarring can that be, really, if it makes a kid look out beyond her own window and really start to wonder about things? Certainly, I wasn't the only kid that Sturgeon's stories had a huge impact on--nor the only one who would grow up and write about it.

They were all stories written before I'd even been born, and originally published in Weird Tales, and F&SF, and the like. (There are Weird Tales covers posted online, by the way, which are great fun to examine and deconstruct, if you're into that sort of thing...and who isn't, really?)

Of science fiction, Sturgeon said in an interview:

I believe it is the wrong name for the field. It should have been called a number of other things - speculative fiction, for example. In many people's minds, science fiction is girls in brass brassieres about to be raped by a slimy monster, and being rescued by some guy fully dressed in a space suit with a zap gun. It is all in the future, all in space, it is all Star Wars and Buck Rogers.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.
It's things that happen inside your head. I've always said that there's more in inner space than in outer space. Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.

That really sums up the lure of specfic for me; first as a small, over-imaginative girl in eastern Montana in the 70s, then through college and grad school, and now.

So what's it mean, though, really? To some extent, shouldn't fiction explore inner space in general? Probably, yes. That doesn't mean it actually happens that way, though. The forced, artificial resemblance of some kind of objective, recognizable reality creates constraints restricting the territory explored by more mainstream genres.

As soon as a story departs those constraints, as soon as the internal reality of the story makes a leap into the unfamiliar and takes the reader with it, a panoramic view opens up, revealing just how big a place all that inner space really is. Immediately thereafter, we ghettoize that story into a niche called science fiction. Or horror. Or fantasy.

What else is one to do with, for example, a gender-bending story about characters who actually change sex midway through the story--a problem as true for the reader of Woolf's Orlando as of Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness? Because really, isn't the crux of the problem a sort of magical thinking? That if we can be persuaded to imagine something, to believe it, perhaps it becomes real in increments? And if that's so, then suddenly the horizon of our described reality seems quite distant, indeed. So literature that knocks walls out of those careful boxes--not in a humorous manner, but in a way that's direct, straightforward, and matter-of-fact--presents a quandary that may be a challenge, a promise, or a threat, depending on the reader's perspective.

Ursula Le Guin said, in "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?":

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and even trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom. (Le Guin, The Language of the Night, Berkley 1985, p44--I looked for the essay online for you guys, but no such luck. Buy the book. Really. It's worth every cent, and then some.)

So what of those Weird Tales covers, then? Is there something intrinsically true about those bug-eyed monsters slavering over helpless virgins? What of that vampire teddy bear? What are we to make of the need to examine the awful, alongside those ideas that are expanding and uplifting? What's that about, that need to embody our worst fears, and stand them up in the light where, yep, sometimes they really are that scary and disgusting?

More on this, I'm sure, as I poke through it. There's been so much terrific stuff written about it, and I believe more to do, still, especially as we move deeper into a seriously scary time in our country and our world.

The most important thing, of course, is that spec fic must stay true, else it loses its potency.

LACon IV

2006-08-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

I'm in Anaheim at my first WorldCon. The official opening ceremony is at one. So in the interim, I've had a chance to catch up with a couple of friends, Mighty Dawno of the Sparkly Ears and Medievalist. It's always wonderful to put faces and voices with people you know and admire from online acquaintance.

Based on this very limited experience, though--if you get a chance to do a big con, jump on it! I'll keep y'all updated as the week progresses.

Paranoia in the streets...

2006-08-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

Pass a Federal Background check if you want to volunteer for the Red Cross, now.

Multimedia message

2006-08-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

Big sky sounds corny, but it's observably true.

Multimedia message

2006-08-10T12:30:00.000-07:00

Harvest moon, Montana.

Shooting

2006-07-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

At the Jewish Federation building in Seattle this afternoon, a man walked into the building--somehow got a shotgun through security according to one locally-reported source--and shot at least six women, according to the local King 5 news team.

He's reported by eyewitnesses to have announced, upon his arrest, "I'm a Muslim American. I'm angry at Israel," although the AP account contradicts that statement.

One fatality. Five injuries. Three in critical condition. The suspect is in custody.

You might spare a thought or good wish for the victims and their families.

Oooh, baby, I love your ways...

2006-07-16T00:16:00.000-07:00

A chestnut colt. Mom and baby are both healthy and vigorous.

*whew* Finally!

Multimedia message

2006-07-15T23:50:00.000-07:00

Multimedia message

2006-07-15T23:31:00.000-07:00

Baby!

VP and how the clock works

2006-07-04T00:33:00.000-07:00

I got into Viable Paradise. I've wanted to do this workshop since I found out about it.

Last year, I just didn't feel like my writing skills and dedication to the craft were up to par, to really get the most from the experience.

I'm awfully happy. This should be a big part of learning how the clock works.*

*Two of my dearest friends once pointed out that if someone gave me a pillowcase full of watch and clock parts, I couldn't rest until I'd learned to reassemble all the bits, and then proceeded to deconstruct clock theory in general; whereas a saner person might just run out to the local store and purchase the clock they wanted. They say I approach writing and publishing the same way. It seems to be symptomatic of how my brain works in general.

And now, on their first world tour--Gay Zombie Penguins!

2006-06-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

Click the cartoon to see it full-size.

Here's the complete listing of scheduled tour stops!

My sincere thanks to Emily Veinglory.

*Grin*

Pictures from my yard...

2006-06-09T20:59:00.000-07:00

Multimedia message

2006-06-09T20:58:00.000-07:00

Multimedia message

2006-06-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

The best-smelling roses, ever.

Multimedia message

2006-06-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

Jedi honeysuckle.

Spread it like a Virus

2006-06-06T10:32:00.000-07:00

The Donate to AW page. Self-explanatory.

The AbsoluteWrite Water Cooler is an online forum for writers, but much more besides. This is a place where the Would-Be can learn from the Been-There.

Link it up, if you'd be so kind. Spread the word.

As we venture into this brave new world of invisible, wireless connections to one another all over the world, venues like AW are at the forefront, establishing a new paradigm for "community."

A simple definition of community :

com·mu·ni·ty ( P ) Pronunciation Key (k-myn-t)
n. pl. com·mu·ni·ties
A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government.
The district or locality in which such a group lives.
A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international business community.
A group viewed as forming a distinct segment of society: the gay community; the community of color.
Similarity or identity: a community of interests.
Sharing, participation, and fellowship.
Society as a whole; the public.
Ecology.
A group of plants and animals living and interacting with one another in a specific region under relatively similar environmental conditions.
The region occupied by a group of interacting organisms.

[Middle English communite, citizenry, from Old French, from Latin commnits, fellowship, from commnis, common. See common.]

What the dictionary definitions fail to capture, and why a simple dictionary definition is nearly always inadequate when establishing an agreed-upon lexicon of shared vocabulary and definition, is the complex interplay of association and emotion connected to an especially powerful word.

This is one of those words.

Today

2006-06-02T05:19:00.000-07:00

I am more than usually aware of the fragile nature of the web that connects us, one to another, here in the ether.

Ahh--OOOooog-A

2006-05-31T16:47:00.000-07:00

The AW Hostage Crisis has been Boing-Boinged.

Also, please let me direct your attention to Making Light's recent update, and link round-up. Our good friend Dawno is, as always, about two steps ahead of me, too. There's also the Random Acts of Kindness approach.

A friend of mine just emailed me to say, "Barbara Bauer and her nineteen friends must be puking a lot these last few days."

We can only hope. You can help, personally, by clicking the paypal button at the bottom of this post, or else spread the word. Feel free to email me if you need help with code for either of the buttons--there's a link to contact me directly, to the right and towards the top, on the sidebar.

Neasa from Stones' comments has taken up the cause, too. She's put the AW button on her blog and is helping spread the word to non-writers--thank you, Neasa! (She's got a cool and beautiful blog, too--go and look. You won't be sorry. And she's a bellydancer.)

Also, I'll be posting this on my regular domain for easy linkage, later--but don't miss this.
Jim Macdonald--Yog Sysop, for you sff.net regulars and Usenet veterans--has done an amazing and generous thing and assembled this list:

Books for Writers

Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books by William Germano
The Craft of Research, 2nd edition by Wayne C. Booth, Joseph M. Williams, & Gregory G. Colomb
An Author's Guide to Scholarly Publishing (Princeton Paperbacks) by Robin Derricourt
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
Getting Permission: How To License & Clear Copyrighted Materials Online & Off by Richard Stim
On Writing by Stephen King
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Self-Publishing by Jennifer Basye Sander
The Business of Writing for Children by Aaron Shepard
Conflict, Action and Suspense (Elements of Fiction Writing) by William Noble
The Concise Guide to Copy Editing by Paul LaRocque
Garner's Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner
Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children by Karen Judd
Editing Fact and Fiction: A Concise Guide to Book Editing by Leslie T. Sharpe & Irene Gunther
Characters and Viewpoint (Elements of Fiction Writing) by Orson Scott Card
Conceiving the Heavens: Creating the Science Fiction Novel by Melissa Scott
Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight
The Chicago Manual of Style: The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors, and Publishers (15th Edition) by University of Chicago Press Staff
Elements of Style (4th ed.) by William Strunk and E. B. White
The Writer's Legal Guide: An Authors Guild Desk Reference by Tad Crawford and Kay Murray
Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer by Bruce Holland Rogers
Getting into Print: The Decision-Making Process in Scholarly Publishing by Walter W. Powell
Writing for Scholarly Publication by Anne Sigismund Huff
How I Work As a Poet and Other Essays by Lew Welch
How to Get Happily Published (5th Ed) by Judith Appelbaum
You Can Write Children's Books by Tracey E. Dils
How to Write & Sell Your First Novel by Oscar Collier, Frances Spatz Leighton
The Screenwriter's Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script by David Trottier
Beginnings, Middles & Ends by Nancy Kress
Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by L. Rust Hills
Copyright Plain & Simple by Cheryl Besenjak
If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda Ueland
Line by Line: How to Improve Your Own Writing by Claire Kehrwald Cook
The Making of a Bestseller : Success Stories from Authors and the Editors, Agents, and Booksellers Behind Them by Brian Hill & Dee Power
Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass
Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th Edition)
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Knowlton Zinsser
Persist and Publish: Helpful Hints for Academic Writing and Publishing by Ralph E. Matkin, T.F. Riggar
Proofreading Plain and Simple (Plain and Simple Series) by Debra Hart May
Putting It Together: Turning Sow's Ear Drafts Into Silk Purse Stories by Mike Resnick
The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman
Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain
On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner & Raymond Carver
The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life by Julia Cameron
The Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus by Christine Lindberg
How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James Frey
Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer's Manual by Rita Mae Brown
Words into Type by Marjorie E. Skillin
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card
The Essential Writer's Notebook by Natalie Goldberg
Writing Without Teachers by Peter Elbow
The Craft of Revision by Donald M. Murray
- Writers' and Artists' Yearbook: 2006 by Terry Pratchett (Editor)
- The Writer's Handbook: 2006 by Barry Turner (Editor)
- Literary Market Place 2006: The Directory of the American Book Publishing Industry (LMP) R. R. Bowker
- 2006 Poet's Market by Nancy Breen (Editor)
- 2006 Writer's Market by Katie Struckel Brogan (Editor)
- Jeff Herman's Guide To Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents, 2006 (Jeff Herman, editor)
- 2006 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market by Lauren Mosko (Editor)
- 2006 Childrens Writers & Illustrators Market by Alice Pope (Editor)

Book sales from this page will help support Absolute Write and the Absolute Write Water Cooler

SFWA Top 20 Worst Agents List,
Dawno,
barbarabauer,
AWMondayMemes

Calling all Stragglers

2006-05-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

If you're one of our AW peeps, and can't find us, we're hanging out temporarily at some of these places:

The AW Refugee Camp, kindly hosted by Roger Carlson our Tech mod.

The Making Light AW thread, kindly started by TNH.

Now you can get the tee shirt to commemorate this...ummm....occasion:

Dawno's "I survived the AW Shutdown" stuff at Cafe Press.

I'll update when I know anything about the restoration of the board.

I'm terribly interested in the fact that every IT person I know is a bit gobsmacked that our host just kept our data. No one's heard of that happening, apparently.

Heh. Our Jenna, she's a trendsetter.

Keep the faith, folks.

"You...

2006-05-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

...can't stop the signal."

Writer Beware's 20 Worst Agents:

" Below is a list of the 20 literary agencies about which Writer Beware has received the greatest number of advisories/complaints over the past several years.

None of these agencies has a significant track record of sales to commercial (advance-paying) publishers, and most have virtually no documented and verified sales at all (book placements claimed by some of these agencies turn out to be "sales" to vanity publishers). All charge clients before a sale is made--whether directly, by levying fees such as reading or administrative fees, or indirectly, for editing or other adjunct services.

Writer Beware recommends that writers avoid questionable literary agencies, and instead query agencies that have verifiable track records of sales to commercial publishing houses.

Note that while the 20 agencies listed here account for the bulk of the complaints we receive, they're just the tip of the iceberg. Writer Beware has files on nearly 400 questionable agencies, and we learn about a new one every few weeks."

The Abacus Group Literary Agency

Allred and Allred Literary Agents (refers clients to "book doctor" Victor West of Pacific Literary Services)

Barbara Bauer Literary Agency

Benedict Associates (also d/b/a B.A. Literary Agency)

Sherwood Broome, Inc.

Capital Literary Agency (formerly American Literary Agents of Washington, Inc.)

Desert Rose Literary Agency

Arthur Fleming Associates

Finesse Literary Agency (Karen Carr)

Brock Gannon Literary Agency

Harris Literary Agency

The Literary Agency Group, which includes the following:
-Children's Literary Agency
-Christian Literary Agency
-New York Literary Agency
-Poets Literary Agency
-The Screenplay Agency
-Stylus Literary Agency (formerly ST Literary Agency, formerly Sydra-Techniques)
-Writers Literary & Publishing Services Company (the editing arm of the above-mentioned agencies)

Martin-McLean Literary Associates

Mocknick Productions Literary Agency, Inc.

B.K. Nelson, Inc.

The Robins Agency (Cris Robins)

Michele Rooney Literary Agency (also d/b/a Creative Literary Agency, Simply Nonfiction, and Michele Glance Rooney Literary Agency)

Southeast Literary Agency

Mark Sullivan Associates

West Coast Literary Associates (also d/b/a California Literary Services)

BarbaraBauer

Buttons and Codes

2006-05-26T01:48:00.000-07:00

Matt's Button--

Okay--blogger isn't helping one bit with posting the code, it keeps wanting to fix it for me. So here it is, but you've got to replace the [ ] brackets with <> brackets, instead, for html.

[a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974934445/
absolutewrite" target="new" title="Get your copy of The Street Smart Writer and support AW, too!"][img src="http://www.mattdinniman.com/aw2.gif" /][/a]

Feel free to swipe it, and if you have trouble with the code, just let me know.

Matt, how hard is it to make the button bigger?

Let's make a couple more, folks, so peeps have a choice--what do you think?

ETA:

Street Smart Writers

2006-05-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

Jenna's blog, in case you hadn't found it.

She says she isn't comfortable taking donations for the forums, yet, until she knows if she can "put Humpty Dumpty together again."
We can all buy more copies of The Street Smart Writer, though.

Jenna's page about the book is here.

Lisa Spangenberg, our own Digital Medievalist, points out in an email:

"Now, if we all link to the Amazon page for the book, using this url:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974934445/absolutewrite

Then AbsoluteWrite gets a little bit of cash from Amazon, and we can
save
someone from the Barbara Bauers of the world.

Pass it on . . .
http://www.jennaglatzer.com/street-smart.htm "

Maybe someone would like to design us a nifty sidebar button to share around?

In the Meantime...

2006-05-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

Roger Carlson has put up a forum as a gathering place for displaced AW folk--you have to register, but it's free.

Oh dear...

2006-05-25T03:34:00.000-07:00

Let us consider the saga of Barbara Bauer, literary agent from hell:

What's worse for a scammy agent than being prominently featured on Writer Beware's 20 Worst Agents list? Or attracting the aggravated attention of the redoubtable and delicious Miss Snark?

Why, having a series of very public temper tantrums about it, creating a ludicrous nuisance of yourself, and generally giving the whole thing oh-so-much-more Google juice than it ever would have had, otherwise. Better minds than mine have cooked up a smart and dirty Google Bomb. Do consider participating.

Heh. Also, don't miss Fireflies in the Cloud's hilarious follow-up post, complete with illustrations.

Then consider how wise it is to put yourself squarely in the sights of a bunch of writers--after depriving them of a time-consuming and much-beloved hobby by getting a favorite hang-out like AbsoluteWrite pulled down off the web, even temporarily.

Jenna Glatzer is one of ours. She consistently and tirelessly fights the good fight. If you really want to take her on, Barbara, you'll have to take on all of us.

ETA: Oh, look! Barbara Bauer has been Wiki'ed!

A whole host of others.

More blogging about Barbara Bauer.

BarbaraBauer

AW Down but not Out

2006-05-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

AbsoluteWrite's message boards are temporarily down, for those of you who might wander by here looking for information. We've been temporarily frozen out, through the combined effects of an apparently inept-but-abusive supposed literary agent, and a cowardly and amateurish web host overreaction.

Blustering agent Barbara Bauer, PhD (wooHOO)--proprietor of the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency and proud member of WriterBeware's 20 Worst Agents list--called up our webhost and they shut us out.

Thanks a lot, JC Hosting. Way to stand up for what's right. Don't look to word of mouth from us for a whole lot of positive future traffic, I'm afraid. Best of luck with Barbara's good wishes, though, since you've chosen sides like this.

It's a long and sordid story, and you can get the gist of it here.

We're working diligently to get everything back up, and at this point it looks like we've saved the databases, and should be back and badder than ever sometime tomorrow morning.

Thanks, everyone. Blog it, if you can. Then blog it some more. Be sure and use her name: Barbara Bauer, or even Barbara Bauer, PhD. Perhaps we can all compare nasty and abusive emails, later! Won't that be fun?

technorati tag--and pass it along: BarbaraBauer

You must remember this...

2006-05-18T02:31:00.000-07:00

I submit for your consideration The Payphone Project--self-described as "stories, pictures, phone numbers and news from payphones and public telephony."

Just the price of the gas in this picture should give you a hint as to how long ago it was taken. Ah, the good old days.
My personal experiences with payphones over the years tend toward the middle-of-the-night, damn-I'm-in-a-fix variety. You know the kind I mean, right? Your car broke down and you've just hiked along the shoulder of some lonely two-lane highway, in the dark. You find a roadhouse with a payphone in the back, through the smoke and past the pooltables.

So you cradle the receiver and fish in your pockets for enough change for what's going to be a long-distance call from the middle of nowhere, and when you finally manage to get through, you stick your finger in your free ear to block the loud music from the crummy local band, and shout your location to whoever was unfortunate enough to pick up, on the other end of the line--never mind that you can only make out about every third word they try to reply.

Then, if you've still got a couple of bucks in your pocket, you go order a draft beer and settle in to wait for your friend, roommate, sister--or whoever you called--to come and retrieve your sorry ass.

That can't possibly just be me. That's happened to all of you, too, right? Before we all carried cellphones, I mean?

Much has been made of the vanishing payphone, in this brave day of blackberries, cells, and wifi hot spots. The disappearance of coin-operated telephones creates problems for people in remote areas, since guaranteed cell service still isn't a Constitutionally protected right.

Here's an article that points out some of the issues with losing these free-standing, well-lit oases of communication with the rest of the world.

From The New York Times in October 2005:

The pay phone in the dirt parking lot of the Acworth General Store here is not terribly impressive, its base coated in grime and a plastic-covered phone book hanging limply from its metal frame.

But to residents of this village of 150 people in southwestern New Hampshire, it is a phone worth fighting for. The town gets no cellphone reception, and there is no other pay phone for miles. The police and volunteer fire departments even have to use the phone sometimes when their radios do not work.

I don't really need payphones, anymore. I just sort of miss them, you know? For all that my friends make fun of my propensity to fondle my cell phone--which lets me check my email, download music, text and send pictures, and even take snapshots or short digital video clips--there was more than once I was awfully happy to see even a beat-up payphone with the yellow-pages long since gone missing.

Even now, especially on the road, driving long distances, I find myself noticing and remembering where I last saw a phone. You know, just in case.
Not to mention that poor Supes is going to have to figure out yet another whole new system for those quick costume changes.

2006-05-03T03:36:00.000-07:00

Just found this post, (via Bitch, Phd)on a blog called Super Babymama.

Since I've nothing particularly interesting of my own to say, I thought I'd at least direct you to someone who does.

I'll be more myself, I'm sure, when my brain returns from wherever it's gone this time.

Spring

2006-04-21T23:44:00.000-07:00

You know how when you go to the beach and wade out into the surf, if you watch the water instead of keeping your head up to orient between sand and water and sky, the sea tries to coax you out deeper and deeper, and you don't even quite realize it until a bigger wave nearly lifts you off your feet, and you look up suddenly, remembering that you're supposed to be watching that--that the ocean will swallow you up--and you realize you're much further from dry land than you meant to go?

That's what spring is like, for me. I understand why adults, kids, and teens, Christians, pagans and neo pagans alike, all want to build bonfires and stay out in the newly-warming nights. Chasing around, playing tag as dark falls, watching the flames dance, breathing deeply of the rising tide of green.

I wish I knew the constellations better, to understand the seasonal differences in their positions.

So that's where I've been, just lately.

I've been listening to that siren call that would take me far out to sea.

Gift Song Meme

2006-04-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

This was Medievalist's idea, and I think it sounds like really a serious lot of fun.

1. Pick one or more of your friends who listens to digital music; preferably someone who already has iTunes and an iTunes account, and who has a blog or Live Journal or somthing similar.

Songs are .99 cents on iTunes; if people want to send MP3s directly, that's up to them, but post the song title, artist, and album anyway. You can use a credit card or PayPal to purchase songs. I suspect it's possible give music with other music services, but I don't know. There are also lots of good sources for free music on the net; feel free to use those, or to publicize indie artists you like a lot. Oh, and there are
free songs at Amazon too.

2. Select the song you want to give.

3. Post this meme on your blog or Live Journal, and list your friends, the song you've chosen for them, (keep the song a secret until after you friend receives it, if you'd like), a link to their blog, and these instructions. Feel free to add a comment about why you chose the song.

4. Purchase the single song for each friend, one at a time, (that is don't buy three songs for three friends.) If you use the iTunes store, find the song, then click on the link for the album; you will see a link near the top of the screen that says "Gift This Music"; click it, then click the Gift button that's included in the link for the song. When you check out, you'll see a form with spaces for your name, your friend's name and email address, and a short message. This will be emailed to your friend, with instructions about how to download their gift song. Use the message to send them a link to the permalink for your blog post about the meme so they'll know to blog about the song. If you use Tags, tag the post as "Gift Music."

5. If you decide to "gift back" to someone who tags you, please also tag someone else, so we can have a variety of musical tastes, journals, blogs, and people.

So I'm tagging Mark Pettus, at The Bluff; Dawno, at NVNC ID VIDES, NVNC NE VIDES; Jenna Glatzer at Hot Diggety; and Ray Wong. Also, I'm sending one to Medievalist, cuz it was her idea--but it might show up in her LJ, instead. (Of all these, I think Lisa is the only one likely to have whatever I send. She's already doing the meme, too.)

ETA: If you have trouble with the links in your email, try recopying the actual link (double checking that there are no line breaks or extra spaces) into your browser address bar, and navigating to pick up your gifted song that way.

gift music meme

For your contemplation

2006-04-12T20:47:00.000-07:00

Five Reasons Torture is always wrong.

Christianity Today is an unlikely source for me. I've deep and long-term philosophical differences with self-identified Christianity. Nonetheless, many of my friends profess to be Christians, which declaration always makes me squirm a bit--then I feel sort of dirty, as if I'd said "some of my best friends are straight...(or black, or queer, or fill-in-the-blank.)"

So a thank you nod to TNH over at Making Light, for her Particles in the sidebar.

At some point we must, all of us, make a stand that wrong is wrong is wrong.

Torture is wrong.

2006-04-09T20:31:00.000-07:00

The WA State Highway 2 trestle, from beneath.

The moon is high, and there are cars up there, going somewhere.

April Fools' Day

2006-04-01T00:25:00.000-08:00

One possible origin for April Fools' Day, or All Fools' Day.

My favorite explanation for this holiday, and the likeliest sounding, is found here:

Another explanation of the origins of April Fools' Day was provided by Joseph Boskin, a professor of history at Boston University. He explained that the practice began during the reign of Constantine, when a group of court jesters and fools told the Roman emperor that they could do a better job of running the empire. Constantine, amused, allowed a jester named Kugel to be king for one day. Kugel passed an edict calling for absurdity on that day, and the custom became an annual event.

The problem with that explanation is that the good professor invented it. Never happened. Was, itself, an April Fools' joke.

As not a particularly subtle person, I've played my share of practical jokes, over the years.

Just wanted to remind y'all to be a bit skeptical, today.

Happy April.

Jill Carroll released

2006-03-30T03:55:00.000-08:00

Journalist Jill Carroll, kidnapped in Iraq back in January, has been released by her captors.

Stones In the Field

A Gallimaufry, to Start Myself Posting Here Again

Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition

Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition

Breaking News:

Eligibility requirements for our 2010 competition are as follows:

A Christmas Story

The longest night

A Very Merry Thanksgiving, All

End of Summer 2009

Requiescat In Pace

Health Care

Monday, Monday...

Okay, big changes a-coming

A summer of diversity in E-fiction

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Tiresome Administrative Tasks

2008 Kalamazoo Paper

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I'm late with this blog announcement, but delighted to point you towards the new Coyote Wild:

Coyote Wild 2.2

February 2008

Stories

Poetry

Since it came up in the comments...

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The Big Horse Posts, collected

Merry Christmas!

The Holly and the Ivy : Lyrics

New Coyote Wild!

December 2007 Volume One Issue Five

Stories

Stuff to Read Today

Another intermission

Fiction:

Poetry:

The Magical Other and Misogyny

And now, a brief intermission

Part III, or, The Magical Other

Magical Negroes, Expendable Queers, and other well-worn tropes, part II

Magical Negroes, expendable queers, and other well-worn tropes

I'm back!

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Pippin the Wondermutt 199?-May 1O, 2OO7

Free speech free-for-all

Sunday Links Roundup

Spring!

Rainy February Night

Revisiting II

Snow...

I'd planned to write a long letter tonight...

Revisiting

Solstice Approaches

To My Mad Comment Thread Vandal

Take a second and click -

Scheduled Maintenance on Absolute Write

I've been tagged

Googling

Jeep Update

Please Vote

The Jeep Saga continues...

Author Scoop

A Peek Into the Writer Mind...

Pass it along.

To our everlasting shame...